Don't Listen to Me, I'm Just a Lunatic

I've Been Saying They Should Do This For 10 Years Now

2011-05-16T07:52:00.003-04:00

RADICAL NON-VIOLENT RESISTANCE IS SWEEPING THE MUSLIM WORLD, THIS IS WHAT I'VE BEEN SAYING THE PALESTINIANS SHOULD HAVE BEEN DOING 10 YEARS AGO, SHUT JERUSALEM DOWN!!! THIS ARAB SPRING IS GIVING ME MY FAITH BACK IN HUMANITY AGAIN, TIME TO GET TO WORK, THE GREAT WORK!!!

Monday, May. 16, 2011
Palestinian Border Protests: The Arab Spring Model for Confronting Israel
By Karl Vick

After more than 100 Palestinians breached Israel's border with Syria on Sunday, knocking down a fence and striding into a village in the Golan Heights, overmatched Israeli security forces scrambled to glean what they could from the protesters who had just, without so much as a sidearm, penetrated farther into the country than any army in a generation.

Under close questioning, the infiltrators closed the intelligence gap with a shrug and one word: Facebook. The operation that had caught Israel's vaunted military and intelligence complex flat-footed was announced, nursed and triggered on the social networking site that has figured in every uprising around the Arab World — and is helping young Palestinians change the terms of their fight against Israel. (See pictures of tempers flaring across the Middle East.)

The headlines Sunday were all about the violence of the day: at least four people were shot dead by Israeli forces on the Syrian fence line, and as many as 10 were killed either by Israeli or Lebanese army gunfire at a similar demonstration on the nearby frontier with southern Lebanon. The death toll, along with the accounts of stone-throwing and tear gas, comport with the familiar narrative of the conflict, one constructed over years of Israel describing efforts to defend itself. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu encouraged that narrative on Sunday, arguing that the protesters were undermining the very existence of the State of Israel.

But those closer to events found in the day the makings of a new narrative. The Palestinians in Syria, Lebanon and the occupied Palestinian enclaves of Gaza and the West Bank approached Israeli gun positions on Sunday without arms of their own. If some teenagers threw rocks, a protest leader said they had apparently failed to attend the workshops on nonviolence the organizers arranged in what they call a new paradigm for the conflict. The aim, which appears to be building support, aims to re-cast the Palestinian-Israel conflict on the same terms that brought down dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia.

Massive non-violent protests are aimed at winning international sympathy for the Palestinian perspective, and as a result, forcing Israel to pull out of territories its army has occupied since 1967. As the dust settled Sunday, senior Israeli officers acknowledged their vulnerability to the approach, which dovetails with the strategy of Palestinian leaders to ask the UN General Assembly to recognize a Palestininian state in September. (See "A New Palestinian Movement: Young, Networked, Nonviolent.")

"What we saw today was the promo for what we might see in September on the day the United Nations declares a state: Thousands of Palestinians marching toward Israeli checkpoints, Israeli settlements and the fence along the West Bank and Gaza Palestinians coming with their bare hands to demonstrate," a senior Israeli officer tells TIME. "This is a huge problem. Well have to study what happened today to do better."

Sundays protests marked the anniversary of Israels 1948 declaration of statehood, a day known as Nakba, or the catastrophe, to Palestinians who lost their land to the Jewish state. The day is routinely occasion for protests, and Israel had prepared for unrest. But in the Golan Heights, high ground Israel took from Syria in 1967, only 30 to 40 soldiers were on duty where hundreds of Palestinians began arriving by bus and marching toward the fence. Troops were ordered to shoot to maim. Four protesters were killed, and at least 100 scrambled into Majdal Shams, a Druze village so close to the Syrian frontier it's known for the shouting hill where families separated by the fence gather to exchange news by hollering across no-mans land.

Less clear was how the protesters navigated the Syrian security which usually maintains strict control over the border area. Israeli officials interpreted protesters' apparent ease of access to a military zone as evidence of sponsorship by the battered government of President Bashar al-Assad. With street protests threatening his regime in cities across Syria, the reasoning goes, al-Assad found in the Nakba protests a perfect opportunity to shift the focus to Israel.

But Fadi Quran, a Ramallah organizer in the Palestinian youth movement that promoted the marches, says his contacts in Syria were actually terrified of the Bashar government, which took steps to prevent some from traveling to the protests from refugee camps near Damascus where they have lived since fleeing their homes in what is now northern Israel. (See pictures of young Palestinians in the age of the wall.)

Governments of other neighboring states that host large Palestinian populations, apparently were aware of the protest plans, and responded according to their own interests. Egypt and Jordan, which have treaties with Israel, impeded the demonstrations. Those who are hostile, including Lebanon, eased their way into military zones. But Damascus appeared to be pre-occupied with its own domestic unrest, according to Quran. "I honestly think to a very large extent they took the Syrian government by surprise," he tells TIME.

Demonstrators also gathered in Gaza and on the West Bank. Even there, on a march toward the Qalandia check-point near Ramallah, Quran insists no stones were thrown until Israeli troops fired tear gas, and then only by adolescents. But the overall make-up of the crowd, featuring older women and men as well as students, was a change from previous years, according to Shawan Jabarin of the human rights advocacy group Al Haq.

"They say the Arab Spring gives people encouragement and makes people feel they can make a difference," says Jabarin. "The consciousness of the people, you feel it's something different." (See "Palestinians Mark Nakba with Violent Protests.")

Also encouraging people into the streets: The complete breakdown of peace talks with Israel. If Palestinians needed any additional reminder, the resignation of former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell as President Obamas special envoy for peace was announced two days before Nakba Day.

"We have to come up with an improvement in non-lethal weapons, no doubt," says an aide to an Israeli cabinet minister. "But if we have a new approach to peace talks then we won't have to deal with non-lethal weapons in September."

For their part, Palestinian protesters feel they've found a winning formula. The main political factions, Hamas and Fatah, were forced into their embrace by the same non-violent youth movement that now summons ordinary Palestinians to unite in shaming Israel into concessions.

"They understand the path to freedom is going to be long," Quran says "but were going to continue training in nonviolence, and were going to continue marching in nonviolence until it is very clear in the international media who is violating human rights."

— With reporting by Aaron J. Klein

Another great article I found here, power to the young people!!!

Thursday, Mar. 31, 2011
A New Palestinian Movement: Young, Networked, Nonviolent
By Joe Klein

Fadi Quran is the face of the new Middle East. He is 23, a graduate of Stanford University, with a double major in physics and international relations. He is a Palestinian who has returned home to start an alternative-energy company and see what he can do to help create a Palestinian state. He identifies with neither of the two preeminent Palestinian political factions, Hamas and Fatah. His allegiance is to the Facebook multitudes who orchestrated the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and who are organizing nonviolent protests throughout the region. In the Palestinian territories, the social-networking rebels call themselves the March 15 movement—and I would call Quran one of the leaders of the group except that it doesn't really have leaders yet. It is best described as a loose association of "bubbles," he says, that hasn't congealed. It launched relatively small, semisuccessful protests in the West Bank and Gaza on the aforementioned March 15; it is staging a small, ongoing vigil in the main square of Ramallah. It has plans for future nonviolent actions; it may or may not have the peaceful throngs to bring these off.

I meet with Quran and several other young Palestinians at the local Coca-Cola Bottling Co. headquarters in Ramallah, which tells you something important about this movement: we are not meeting in a mosque. I've known one of them, Fadi El-Salameen, for five years. He was an early volunteer for the Seeds of Peace program, which intermingled Palestinian and Israeli teenagers at a summer camp in Maine. In recent years, El-Salameen has spent much of his time in the U.S. and has achieved a certain prominence—he is quietly charismatic, a world-class networker, the sort of person who is invited to international conferences—but he is now spending more time at home in Hebron, organizing the March 15 movement in the West Bank's largest city. "I met some of the leaders of the Tahrir Square movement at a conference in Doha," he tells me. "They don't fit the usual profile of a 'youth leader.' They are low-key, well educated but not wealthy. They are figuring it out as they go along, trying to figure out what works." (See "Growing Up Palestinian in the Age of the Wall.")

The young Palestinians don't seem as pragmatic as all that; they are somewhere beyond wildly idealistic. "The goal is to liberate the minds of our people," says Najwan Berekdar, an Israeli-born Arab who is a women's-rights activist. "We want to get past all the old identities—Fatah, Hamas, religious, secular, Israeli and Palestinian Arab —and create a mass nonviolent movement." Berekdar has touched on an idea that might prove truly threatening to Israelis: a "one state" movement uniting Palestinians on both sides of the current border. But the young Palestinians have not focused on anything so specific. Their current political plan is to go back to the future—to achieve Palestinian unity by resurrecting and holding elections for a body called the Palestinian National Council, which took a backseat after the Oslo accords created the Palestinian Authority and its parliamentary component. This seems rather abstruse—the basic rule for people-power movements is, Organize first, bureaucratize later — and it would be easy to dismiss these young people as hopelessly naive but for two factors. The first is that they've seized the Palestinian version of a suddenly valuable international brand: the Tahrir Square revolution. "We cannot discount their importance," a prominent Israeli official told me. "Not after what happened in Egypt." (See "In the West Bank, An Economy Without a Nation.")

But equally important are their methods. Ever since Israel won control of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, the Palestinian national movement has been defined by terrorism, intransigence and, until recently in the West Bank, corruption. It has never been known for dramatic acts of nonviolence. "If they'd been led by Gandhi rather than Yasser Arafat, they would have had a state 20 years ago," Kenneth Pollack of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution told me. Israeli officials acknowledge that the recent, peaceful economic and security reforms led by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad have been the most effective tactics the Palestinians have ever used in trying to create a state. But they haven't gotten the Palestinians anywhere in their negotiations with the equally intransigent Israeli government. Jewish settlements continue to expand on Palestinian land. A mass nonviolent movement might tip the balance, especially if the world—including the Israeli public —began to see Palestinians as noble practitioners of passive resistance rather than as suicide bombers.

The Israeli leadership is as perplexed as everyone else about what the revolutionary tide in the region will bring. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he'd prefer dealing with democracies, but he isn't so sure that the Tahrir Square movement will yield a democracy in Egypt (and there are already indications that Egypt's new government will push harder for a Palestinian peace accord than Mubarak ever did). Netanyahu has wisely called for a Marshall Plan for the Middle East, an idea that the Saudis—who seem to agree with the Israelis on practically everything these days—have also quietly endorsed. "If you can't get the young Egyptians involved in big public-works projects, like new housing, which is badly needed," an Israeli intelligence expert told me, "then they're back in the square for sure, only they'll be supporting the Muslim Brotherhood this time."

That seems unduly pessimistic. The Facebook rebels may have more influence on the suddenly antiquated Islamists than vice versa; if there is Shari'a, it will come with alternative-energy start-ups and a Coca-Cola chaser. "You have to wonder what sort of influence this revolution has had on Hamas," a Palestinian Christian said to me. "Are they watching al-Jazeera and seeing nonviolence succeed where terrorism has failed?" (See "In the West Bank: A Visit With a Soon-To-Be Ex-Negotiator.")

The Israelis assume not, which seems a safe assumption: Hamas rule in Gaza is going well, despite the Israeli boycott. "The Hamas military wing is making money off the smuggling from the tunnels [from Egypt into Gaza]," a West Bank businessman tells me. "They sell my product for twice my price. And yet the standard of living is rising in Gaza." In fact, Hamas seems more secure right now than Fatah, despite the economic successes in the West Bank. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been wounded by the leak to al-Jazeera of private memos that showed Palestinian negotiators making what seemed to be major concessions to the Israelis. In order to restore some of his credibility, Abbas has been reaching out to Hamas, raising the prospect of a reconciliation—and destroying any slim hope of an accord with the Israelis. "Abbas has to choose," a Netanyahu aide told me, "between Hamas and us."

So the stalemate continues—with one exception: the March 15 movement and the rush of history in the region. The young activists may be preoccupied by the chimera of Palestinian unity at the moment, but what happens if they turn their full attention to the Israeli occupation? What happens if they begin to organize marches to protest the near daily outrages perpetrated by Jewish settlers? What if they stage sit-down strikes to open roads that are used by settlers but closed to Palestinians? What if they march 10,000 strong against a settlement that is refusing Palestinians access to a traditional water supply? "If it is nonviolent, then that means, by definition, it is civilized," an Israeli official said. "We have no problem with that." But what if the Palestinians are nonviolent and the Jewish settlers are not? "I think about the dogs unleashed on Martin Luther King in Birmingham," Quran says. "I think about the beatings. That's what it took for Americans to see the justice of his cause. We will be risking our lives, but that is what it takes. I only hope that we're not too well educated to be courageous."
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This article says it all doesn't it?

2010-09-29T10:12:00.002-04:00

The link is to a Wikipedia page, but I thought I would include this article as well. Enjoy!

Israeli principal summoned over history textbook that adds Palestinian view

By Catrina Stewart, Contributor
posted September 29, 2010 at 7:19 am EDT

Israel's Education Ministry has called in the principal of Shaar Hanegev high school, which is using a banned textbook that explains both narratives of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Jerusalem —

Israel’s Education Ministry is locked in a row with a liberal high school over its use of a history textbook that gives both the Israeli and Palestinian versions of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The ministry has summoned the principal of Shaar Hanegev high school in southern Israel for “consultations” over the decision to continue using the textbook, which has been banned from the national school curriculum.

Critics denounced the move as a regressive step by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-leaning government to assert the Israeli narrative over the Palestinian one.

The row drives at the heart of Israeli identity, shaped by tales of Jewish heroism in the War of Independence that gloss over the fate of the Palestinians. The Israeli narrative asserts that Palestinians left their homes in what is now Israel of their own volition. The Palestinians contend that they were driven out, and they refer to the creation of Israel as the nakba, or the catastrophe.

“We have a problem with the Palestinian nakba,” says Tom Segev, a prominent Israeli historian. “Instead of just teaching it and telling kids what happened, we keep trying to ignore it, distort it. It reflects our guilt. We don’t know how to deal with it.”

Under current education minister Gideon Saar, Israel has also struck the word nakba from a textbook for Israeli Arab children, arguing that the government should not promote a term that questions the legitimacy of the state.

Textbook prompts students to write their own conclusions

The textbook being used at Shaar Hanegev, aimed at 11th graders, is the product of a decade-long collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian teachers. Each page is split into three columns, with the Israeli narrative down one side, and the Palestinian down the other, with an empty column in the middle for students to write their own conclusions.

It is being used as part of a wider experimental history course aimed at tackling, among other things, the events surrounding what Israel calls its War of Independence, the 1948-49 conflict that prompted hundreds of thousands Palestinians to leave their homes.

The ministry reportedly instructed the school in early September to stop teaching with the book because it was not approved. The principal was subsequently called in, but he is not expected to meet with officials until after the 10-day Sukkot holiday is over, a ministry spokeswoman said. She added that parts of the school’s history program were “problematic,” but would not elaborate further.

“This was a knee-jerk response, almost Pavlovian, to any attempt by the educational system to tackle the Palestinian side,” one teacher at the school said, in comments quoted by Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. “This is a response that attests primarily to narrow-mindedness and an unwillingness to explore new modes of thinking.”

The school could not be reached for comment due to the Sukkot holiday.

Why Israelis fear alternate versions of history

In recent years, Israel’s so-called new historians have helped ignite a public discourse on the events of 1948, challenging the official Israel version of events that Palestinians brought about their own misfortune.

But the breakdown of the Oslo peace process and the outbreak of the second Intifada in 2000 led to a backlash against those who opposed the conventional Zionist view.

Only now, say observers, are the dissenters again being heard.

“The whole thing was swept under the carpet for decades,” says Uri Avnery, a prominent Israeli peace activist who fought in the 1948 war. “Israel is now getting mature enough to face it, and the cultural and educational establishment is scared.”

Israel’s fear is understandable, say some observers, when taken in the context of the peace process, which has dragged on now for 17 years. If Israel recognized that it had driven out some Arabs “with intent,” says Avnery, “this would have huge implications for a future peace agreement and the refugee problem.”
Denial in education reflects broader societal denial

A critical sticking point is the right of return for the Palestinian refugees, made homeless in 1948 and who now live in overcrowded refugee camps in the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. Israel has long rejected anything more than a symbolic right of return, fearing a threat to the state’s Jewish character if thousands of refugees were to return.

Jafar Farrah, director of an Israeli-Arab advocacy group Mossawa (Equality), says that he believes a majority of Palestinians now recognize the Jewish right to self-determination, but argues that the recognition will never be mutual as long as Israel does not accept its part in creating the conflict.

“There is denial in the public discourse, there is denial in the educational discourse," he says. "That is why there is no reconciliation process.”

© The Christian Science Monitor. All Rights Reserved.

Never Quite Heard It Like This Before

2010-09-17T08:48:00.001-04:00

Christianity – the belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
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Something I always need to remember

2009-10-11T00:36:00.001-04:00

A classic model is the one by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. According to him, language is made up of signs and every sign has two sides:

the signifier (French signifiant), the "shape" of a word, its phonic component, i.e. the sequence of letters or phonemes e.g. C-A-T

the signified (French signifié), the ideational component, the concept or object that appears in our minds when we hear or read the signifier e.g. a small domesticated feline (The signified is not to be confused with the "referent". The former is a "mental concept", the latter the "actual object" in the world)

Furthermore, Saussure separated speech acts (la parole) from the system of a language (la langue). Parole was the free will of the individual, whereas langue was regulated by the group, albeit unknowingly.
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Three Lessons of the Lehman Brothers Collapse

2009-09-15T13:41:00.000-04:00

A year ago today, the venerable investment-banking firm Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy protection after the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department pointedly refused to bail the company out, and no other Wall Street outfit was willing to step into the breach. It was the largest bankruptcy ever in the U.S., but the really big news was what happened afterward. First came a financial panic that threatened to shatter the global capitalist order, then came an unprecedented, and unprecedentedly expensive, effort by governments on both sides of the Atlantic to patch things up.

You already knew all this, of course. It happened just last year, and in recent days the news media have engaged in an orgy of commemoration and explanation of the Lehman collapse and its aftermath. So here's the $64 trillion question: What, if anything, have we learned from the experience? (See the top 10 financial collapses of 2008.)

Three main lessons present themselves. First, our complex financial system is awfully fragile. Second, government action is capable of keeping a financial panic from snowballing into a complete economic disaster along the lines of the Great Depression. Third, the government has - in large part because of its success in averting disaster - found it difficult to take any actions that would make the financial system less fragile in the future. That would, apparently, be too much government intervention.

First, the fragility. Allowing Lehman to fail - cited often as the government's biggest boo-boo - started a chain reaction. There was a run on money-market funds after one big money-market fund revealed that it owned a lot of suddenly worthless Lehman debt. London-based hedge funds that relied on Lehman for day-to-day financing found themselves unable to do business because their accounts with Lehman's U.K. subsidiary were frozen. Similar dislocations played out around the world. Before long, financial institutions were paralyzed by fear. They simply didn't trust each other anymore, and didn't want to lend to each other. The financial system proved too fragile to handle the stress. (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

That brings us to lesson No. 2. In the early 1930s, powerful voices at the Treasury and Federal Reserve argued that the deep pain of financial crisis was a necessary economic corrective. "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate," Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon advised President Herbert Hoover. "It will purge the rottenness out of the system." Late last year, you could hear a few people arguing this case on CNBC and even on the floor of the House of Representatives. But after Lehman's failure, no one at Treasury or the Fed talked that way. Instead, the consensus among the policymakers who mattered, in the U.S. and overseas, was that the panic had to be stopped at any cost.

The cost was a bailout that placed trillions of taxpayer dollars at risk. It was expensive, it was messy, it was unfair. It struck many people as downright un-American. But it worked. "I've abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system," is how President George W. Bush described it last December.

Mission accomplished - so far, at least. In the face of a financial shock worse than the Crash of 1929, massive government intervention averted a second Great Depression. Yes, we've still ended up in the worst economic downturn the U.S. has seen since. But while there are surely lots of potholes and wrong turns ahead, there's ample evidence that the economy - both in the U.S. and worldwide - is in the early stages of a rebound. And we have decisions made by government officials to thank for that.

Then again, decisions made by Congress, the Bush and Clinton administrations and federal regulators in the years before the crisis also played a key role in allowing things to get so bad. From ill-considered deregulation of banking and derivatives to over-the-top encouragement of home ownership, Washington's fingerprints were all over the crisis. Almost nothing has been done so far to right these wrongs, or otherwise rein in the excesses of the financial system. Which brings us to lesson No. 3: It's really hard for a democracy to make big changes in the absence of crisis.

President Barack Obama did warn in his speech to Wall Street on Monday that "normalcy cannot breed complacency." But normalcy is breeding complacency - perhaps because complacency is normal. Consider the financial reforms that the Obama Administration wants to push through Congress before year-end - creating a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, giving the Federal Reserve the job of systemic risk regulator, and establishing a "resolution regime" to wind down troubled nonbank financial institutions (like Lehman) and complex bank holding companies in an orderly fashion. Steps in the right direction? Probably. Truly major reforms? Not so much.

In the months after Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, Congress legislated a complete transformation of Wall Street and the banking sector with the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and the segregation of commercial banks from Wall Street. It's not obvious that we need such a drastic overhaul now, but still, the contrasts with 1930s are stark. Ironic, too. By following their belief that financial markets should work out their own problems, Andrew Mellon and his kindred spirits at the Fed triggered a financial collapse that more or less ensured major, permanent government participation in the financial sector. By intervening aggressively, Hank Paulson and his kindred spirits at the Fed haven't quite ensured a continuation of the status quo - some reforms will come, and banks and their regulators will tread more gingerly for at least a few years - but they do seem to have headed off a re-enactment of the New Deal.
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I Think It's About Time to Finally Say "I Told Ya So"

2009-08-26T01:57:00.002-04:00

Ya know, I knew when all this was going down back in the day that after ol' W and his NeoCon Junkies left the oval office, all this shit was going to come out about how they broke all these rules and did all this shit totally wrongly and hapharzardly and that the politicians would want all these probes and investigations into all the shit this administration did wrong. Well, that time has finally come and I feel like saying I told ya so. I knew that going into Iraq was wrong, I knew that all the Guantanamo Bay shit was wrong, I knew that all this extraordinary rendition was wrong, I knew that this whole Valerie Plame thing was wrong, I knew that this entire administration was doing pretty much everything wrong and breaking just about every rule in the book. So, once again, it looks like, in the end, I am finally the one who is vindicated. Oh Vindication, how I love your sweet taste!

CIA's interrogation program hastily put together
By PAMELA HESS and MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer Pamela Hess And Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press Writer Tue Aug 25, 5:04 pm ET

WASHINGTON – With just two weeks of training, or about half the time it takes to become a truck driver, the CIA certified its spies as interrogation experts after 9/11 and handed them the keys to the most coercive tactics in the agency's arsenal.

It was a haphazard process, cobbled together in the months following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington by an agency that had never been in the interrogation business. The result was a patchwork program in which rules kept shifting and the goals often were unclear.

At times, the interrogators went too far, even beyond the wide latitude they were given under the Bush administration's flexible guidelines, according to newly unclassified documents released Monday. Interrogators took the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding beyond what was authorized. Mock executions were held. Family members were threatened. There were hints of rape.

If it was a terrifying process for the detainees, it was a bureaucratic nightmare for the interrogators. Until 2003, the agency provided its interrogators with rules on a case-by-case basis, sometimes giving permission by e-mail or even orally from CIA headquarters.

Despite the lack of clarity, interrogators were required to sign documents saying they understood the rules and would comply with them. Yet they were given ample room to improvise and make decisions about how much humanity to show to terror detainees.

While former Vice President Dick Cheney said the interrogation program was run by "highly trained professionals who understand their obligations under the law," the newly released documents suggest otherwise, at least in the early months.

The interrogators slapped prisoners, held a handgun to one's head, used power drills to make threats and left men shackled and naked in frigid rooms until they cooperated.

"How cold is cold?" one officer said in the 2004 CIA inspector general's report released Monday. "How cold is life threatening?"

The CIA's Counterterrorism Center began training interrogators in November 2002, two months after suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah already had been repeatedly subjected to waterboarding.

But because the CIA had so little information about al-Qaida, CIA analysts could only speculate about what the detainees "should know," hobbling the interrogators' ability to ask meaningful questions and identify misleading or useful answers.

Some in the CIA correctly feared that the existence of the program would leak out someday. Others worried they'd be identified by name in news stories.

"One officer expressed concern that, one day, agency officers will wind up on some 'wanted list' to appear before the World Court for war crimes," the inspector general wrote.

Another added, "Ten years from now we're going to be sorry we're doing this ... (but) it has to be done."

Even the Justice Department, which authorized the interrogation program, conceded in a 2004 memo that "at least in some instances and particularly early in the program," the program appeared to have gone off track.

Attorney General Eric Holder appointed a prosecutor Monday to look into whether such incidents amounted to violation of federal law. He said nobody who operated within the framework of the Justice Department's legal opinions will be charged.

But the program that the Bush administration's Justice Department approved in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks began to short-circuit almost immediately.

In August 2002, government lawyers said interrogators were not supposed to use harsh tactics until all other methods had failed. But three months later, when officials captured the terrorism suspect Abd al-Nashiri, believed to be behind the bombing of the USS Cole, interrogators immediately launched into enhanced tactics.

And the method of waterboarding used by the CIA did not always resemble the clinical, closely supervised process that the Justice Department approved. One official, explaining why interrogators were pouring excessive amounts of water over a detainee's cloth-covered mouth and nose, said, "It is for real."

Another interrogator repeatedly choked off the carotid artery of a prisoner, causing the detainee to pass out, then shaking him awake again. The interrogator had only recently been trained in interrogation tactics and had previous experience only in debriefing, the practice of questioning people already willing to cooperate.

As late as September 2003, the CIA was still sending mixed signals to its interrogators.

"No formal mechanisms were in place to ensure that personnel going to the field were briefed on the existing legal and policy guidance," the report said.

It was a debriefer, not a trained interrogator, who threatened alleged al-Nashiri with a power drill and an unloaded gun. Such threats violate U.S. anti-torture laws.

It's not clear from CIA reports whether waterboarding or other aggressive tactics made America safer, as Cheney has long claimed. CIA officials credited the detention and interrogation program with thwarting several terrorist attacks. But investigators said it's less certain that waterboarding or other coercive tactics directly contributed to that success. In one case, CIA officials staged a mock execution to terrify a detainee into cooperating. Mock executions are prohibited under U.S. law. But authorities believed the detainee was withholding information, and they felt they needed to get creative. So they pretended to kill another detainee in a nearby room.

It was an elaborate setup, complete with a guard playing a dead detainee.

But the scheme apparently didn't work. A senior officer later said the effort was so obviously a ruse, it yielded no benefit to interrogators.
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Determinate Negation

2009-08-14T03:41:00.001-04:00

Thus, while “being” and “nothing” seem both absolutely distinct and opposed, from another point of view they appear the same as no criterion can be invoked which differentiates them. The only way out of this paradox is to posit a third category, “becoming,” which seems to save thinking from paralysis because it accommodates both concepts: “becoming” contains “being” and “nothing” since when something “becomes” it passes, as it were, between nothingness and being. That is, when something becomes it seems to possess aspects of both being and nothingness, and it is in this sense that the third category of such triads can be understood as containing the first two as sublated “moments.”
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AP IMPACT: Secret tally has 87,215 Iraqis dead

2009-04-23T20:14:00.000-04:00

By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer Kim Gamel, Associated Press Writer 58 mins ago

BAGHDAD – Iraq's government has recorded 87,215 of its citizens killed since 2005 in violence ranging from catastrophic bombings to execution-style slayings, according to government statistics obtained by The Associated Press that break open one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war.

Combined with tallies based on hospital sources and media reports since the beginning of the war and an in-depth review of available evidence by The Associated Press, the figures show that more than 110,600 Iraqis have died in violence since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

The number is a minimum count of violent deaths. The official who provided the data to the AP, on condition of anonymity because of its sensitivity, estimated the actual number of deaths at 10 to 20 percent higher because of thousands who are still missing and civilians who were buried in the chaos of war without official records.

The Health Ministry has tallied death certificates since 2005, and late that year the United Nations began using them — along with hospital and morgue figures — to publicly release casualty counts. But by early 2007, when sectarian violence was putting political pressure on the U.S. and Iraqi governments, the Iraqi numbers disappeared. The United Nations "repeatedly asked for that cooperation" to resume but never received a response, U.N. associate spokesman Farhan Haq said Thursday.

The data obtained by the AP measure only violent deaths — people killed in attacks such as the shootings, bombings, mortar attacks and beheadings that have ravaged Iraq. It excluded indirect factors such as damage to infrastructure, health care and stress that caused thousands more to die.

Authoritative statistics for 2003 and 2004 do not exist. But Iraq Body Count, a private, British-based group, has tallied civilian deaths from media reports and other sources since the war's start. The AP reviewed the Iraq Body Count analysis and confirmed its conclusions by sifting the data and consulting experts. The AP also interviewed experts involved with previous studies, prominent Iraq analysts and provincial and medical officials to determine that the new tally was credible.

The AP also added its own tabulation of deaths since Feb. 28, the last date in the Health Ministry count.

The three figures add up to more than 110,600 Iraqis who have died in the war.

That total generally coincides with the trends reported by reputable surveys, which have been compiled either by tallying deaths reported by international journalists, or by surveying samplings of Iraqi households and extrapolating the numbers.

Iraq Body Count's estimate of deaths since the start of the war, excluding police and soldiers, is a range — between 91,466 and 99,861.

The numbers show just how traumatic the war has been for Iraq. In a nation of 29 million people, the deaths represent 0.38 percent of the population. Proportionally, that would be like the United States losing 1.2 million people to violence in the four-year period; about 17,000 people are murdered every year in the U.S.

Security has improved since the worst years, but almost every person in Iraq has been touched by the violence.

"We have lost everything," said Badriya Abbas Jabbar, 54. A 2007 truck bombing targeting a market near her Baghdad home killed three granddaughters, a son and a niece.

North of the capital in the city of Baqouba, a mother shrouded in black calls to her three sons from her doorstep. She calls out as if they were alive, but they were killed in April 2007, when Shiite Muslim militiamen barged into their auto parts store and gunned them down because they were Sunni.

The Health Ministry figures indicate such violence was tremendously deadly. Of the 87,215 deaths, 59,957 came in 2006 and 2007, when sectarian attacks soared and death squads roamed the streets. The period was marked by catastrophic bombings and execution-style killings.

Quantifying the loss has always been difficult. Records were not always compiled centrally, and the brutal insurgency sharply limited on-the-scene reporting. The U.S. military never shared its data.

The Health Ministry was always at the forefront of counting deaths. Under Saddam Hussein, it compiled casualty figures even as U.S. troops closed in on Baghdad, though it later abandoned that effort. It has started up again in fits, and finally began reliable record-keeping at the start of 2005.

Those data were provided to the AP in the form of a two-page computer printout listing yearly totals for death certificates issued for violent deaths by hospitals and morgues between Jan. 1, 2005, and Feb. 28, 2009.

The ministry does not have figures for the first two years of the war because it was devastated in the aftermath of the invasion, the official said.

Experts said the count constitutes an important baseline, albeit an incomplete one. Richard Brennan, who has done mortality research in Congo and Kosovo, said it is likely a "gross underestimate" because many deaths go unrecorded in war zones.

The Iraqi Body Count numbers are likely even more incomplete, given that many killings occurred in incidents journalists were unaware of or in inaccessible areas.

Mass graves have been turning up as improved security allows patrols in formerly off-limits areas, but how many remain will never be known.

The death toll in Iraq has been a hotly disputed subject because of the high political stakes in a war opposed by many countries and by a large portion of the American public. Critics on each side accuse the other of manipulating the death numbers to sway opinion.

While the Pentagon maintains meticulous records of the number of American troops killed — at least 4,275 as of Thursday — it does not publicly release comprehensive Iraqi casualty figures. American units around the country do compile figures, drawing them mostly from the Iraqi military. They are not released publicly but are used to determine trends, according to Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, a U.S. spokesman in Baghdad.

The AP has filed Freedom of Information Act requests since 2005 seeking that data, but has not received it.

The U.S. policy to not fully address civilian deaths has drawn heavy criticism from human rights groups.

"We believe that all warring parties have a duty to keep information on casualties," said Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch in New York. "It's one of many factors one needs to analyze compliance with international humanitarian law."

The AP has tried since the first days of the war to understand how many Iraqis were being killed.

In 2003, AP journalists traveled across Iraq to search hospital records for civilian deaths during the first chaotic month of the invasion. They found that at least 3,240 civilians died that month, including 1,896 in Baghdad, but acknowledged that number was a fraction of the total because record-keeping often fell victim to the bloodshed.

Beginning in May 2005, the AP has tracked war-related casualties as reported by police, hospital and government officials, mosque workers and verifiable witness accounts, breaking down the victims into civilians, soldiers and police. That tally has reached 46,065, including 37,205 civilians, but also underrepresents the true casualty number because many killings go unreported, especially in more remote areas.

Those numbers rose significantly on Thursday with two suicide attacks that killed dozens of people.

There are other clues to the death toll, such as the number of people buried at the main Shiite cemetery in the holy city of Najaf. But even there, the deaths are limited mostly to Shiites and include natural as well as violent causes, so they cannot be considered definitive.

The director of the cemetery's statistics office, Ammar al-Ithari, said the number of burials jumped from just over 32,000 in 2004 and 2005 to nearly 50,000 in 2006 and 54,000 in 2007. It fell to nearly 40,000 last year, as violence declined. There are no statistics from before the war because records were destroyed in the fighting.

The Iraqi official who provided the Health Ministry figures expressed confidence in its count. He said local authorities consistently reported on violence throughout the war, and that the ministry accurately compiled their reports.

He also defended death certificates as an instrument, because relatives need them to bury a body in most cemeteries, as well as for inheritance and compensation purposes.

He acknowledged some slain insurgents could be included in the count but said he believed that number was low because few insurgents went to hospitals for treatment out of fear of detection, and many insurgent groups buried their own fighters without getting death certificates.

Some experts say casualty tallies based on media reports are inaccurate, because too many deaths go unreported. Some favor cluster surveys, in which conclusions are drawn from a select sampling of households.

The largest cluster survey in Iraq was conducted in 2007 by the World Health Organization and the Iraqi government. It concluded that about 151,000 Iraqis had died from violence in the 2003-05 period, but that included insurgents.

A more controversial cluster study conducted between May and July 2006 by Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, published in the Lancet medical journal, estimated that 601,027 Iraqis had died due to violence. The authors said roughly 50,000 more died from nonviolent causes such as heart disease and cancer because of deteriorating health conditions caused by the war.

Critics argue that such surveys are flawed in Iraq because the security situation prevents a proper sampling. They also have margins of error that could skew the numbers by the tens of thousands.

And whatever the number, the ultimate goal is to find ways to reduce it in future conflicts.

"The loss of life among those caught up in conflict is tragic whatever the numbers reported," said Gilbert Burnham, one of authors of the Lancet survey. "And finding approaches which will reduce these deaths is of great importance."

___

Associated Press writer John Heilprin at the United Nations contributed to this report.
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Report Details Pentagon Role in Torture Tactics

2009-04-22T13:56:00.000-04:00

By BOBBY GHOSH / WASHINGTON, D.C. Bobby Ghosh / Washington, D.c. 1 hr 10 mins ago

Opponents of last week's release of memos detailing CIA interrogation techniques argue that they will provide enemies of the United States with a training manual to prepare their operatives for capture. The irony is that the U.S. military appears to have done the exact opposite, taking a training program that had been designed to prepare American soldiers to withstand torture by communist regimes seeking to extract false confessions and twisting it into a highly controversial interrogation manual.

The story of that mutation emerges in disquieting detail in a new report by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. It shows how U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and camps in Afghanistan based some of their interrogations on techniques taken from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program. These techniques included waterboarding, walling (slamming detainees into a flexible wall), sleep deprivation, hooding and using dogs to inspire fear. (See pictures of life inside Guantanamo.)

Although an executive summary of the report was released in December; the full version - which appears to have survived the Pentagon's declassification review with only mild redaction - will likely have much greater impact, coming on the heels of the CIA "torture memos" released last week.

In a statement, SASC chairman Senator Carl Levin said the report "represents a condemnation of both the Bush Administration's interrogation policies and of senior Administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse - such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan - to low-ranking soldiers."

While much of the controversy over interrogation and detention practices at Guantanamo has centered on the CIA, the SASC report puts the spotlight firmly on the Pentagon - specifically on former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his DOD lawyer Jim Haynes, his policy chief Douglas Feith, Guantanamo commanders Major General Michael Dunleavy and Major General Geoffrey Miller, and a raft of other DOD officials. It offers a detailed account purporting to show how these officials - some of them knowingly, others unwittingly - allowed SERE techniques to be used for interrogation. It suggests, too, that many SERE experts and military lawyers raised concerns about and objections to this reverse engineering of techniques used in courses to train Americans to survive captures by communist regimes.

The process began in December 2001, when the DOD's office of general counsel asked the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), which oversees the SERE program, about detainee "exploitation." Within a few months, SERE trainers were training military interrogators bound for Gitmo. (The JPRA would also pass on its expertise to the CIA.)

Soon afterward, the first alarms began to sound. Jerald Ogrisseg, an Air Force SERE psychologist, warned JPRA chief of staff Daniel Baumgartner that waterboarding detainees was illegal. In October 2002, Lieut. Colonel Morgan Banks, an Army SERE psychologist, warned officials at Gitmo of the risks of using SERE techniques for interrogation, pointing out that even with the Army's careful monitoring, injuries and accidents did happen. "The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially," he wrote.

But by then, the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) had already issued two legal opinions, signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, declaring that the techniques did not amount to torture. JPRA training for Gitmo interrogators was stepped up. In December 2002, with Rumsfeld's authorization, officials of the Joint Task Force at Gitmo devised a standard operating procedure for the use of many SERE techniques to interrogate detainees.

Rumsfeld would rescind his authorization in a manner of weeks, after the Navy General Counsel, Alberto Mora, raised concerns about many techniques, arguing that they violated U.S. and international laws and constituted, at worst, torture. Mora met Haynes and warned him that the "interrogation policies could threaten [Rumsfeld's] tenure and could even damage the presidency."

But even after Rumsfeld in January 2003 rescinded the authority for the use of SERE techniques at Gitmo, they remained in use in Afghanistan, and later in Iraq. Since Rumsfeld never declared these techniques illegal, military lawyers down the line were able to cite his original authorization as Pentagon policy. JPRA instructors would eventually travel to Iraq to train military interrogators there.

In the summer of 2004, the JPRA was even considering sending trainers to Afghanistan, prompting another SERE psychologist, Colonel Kenneth Rollins, to warn his colleagues by e-mail: "[W]e need to really stress the difference between what instructors do at SERE school (done to INCREASE RESISTANCE capability in students) versus what is taught at interrogator school (done to gather information). What is done by SERE instructors is by definition ineffective interrogator conduct. Simply stated, SERE school does not train you on how to interrogate, and things you 'learn' there by osmosis about interrogation are probably wrong if copied by interrogators."

The final irony: the torture techniques around which the SERE training was devised were used by Chinese interrogators during the Korean War, not to gather actionable intelligence but to force false confessions from captured U.S. soldiers - confessions that could then be used in anti-American propaganda.

View this article on Time.com

Related articles on Time.com:

* Report Details "Torture" at CIA Prisons
* Report Shows Torture Is Widespread in Iraq
* Iraq Through the Looking Glass(es)
* Are Police in Iraq Ready?
* Pentagon: Hold On, Christian Soldiers!
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Global economy is expected to shrink this year

2009-04-22T12:33:00.000-04:00

By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer Jeannine Aversa, Ap Economics Writer 1 hr 16 mins ago

WASHINGTON – The world economy is likely to shrink this year for the first time in six decades.

The International Monetary Fund projected the 1.3 percent drop in a dour forecast released Wednesday. That could leave at least 10 million more people around the world jobless, some private economists said.

"By any measure, this downturn represents by far the deepest global recession since the Great Depression," the IMF said in its latest World Economic Outlook. "All corners of the globe are being affected."

The new forecast of a decline in global economic activity for 2009 is much weaker than the 0.5 percent growth the IMF had estimated in January.

Big factors in the gloomier outlook: It's expected to take longer than previously thought to stabilize world financial markets and get credit flowing freely again to consumers and businesses. Doing so will be necessary to lift the U.S., and the global economy, out of recession.

The report comes in advance of Friday's meetings between the United States and other major economic powers, and weekend sessions of the IMF and World Bank. The talks will seek to flesh out the commitments made at a G-20 leaders summit in London last month, when President Barack Obama and the others pledged to boost financial support for the IMF and other international lending institutions by $1.1 trillion.

The IMF's outlook for the U.S. is bleaker than for the world as a whole: It predicts the U.S. economy will shrink 2.8 percent this year. That would mark the biggest such decline since 1946.

Among the major industrialized nations studied, Japan is expected to suffer the sharpest contraction this year: 6.2 percent. Russia's economy would shrink 6 percent, Germany 5.6 percent and Britain 4.1 percent. Mexico's economic activity would contract 3.7 percent and Canada's 2.5 percent.

Global powerhouse China, meanwhile, is expected to see its growth slow to 6.5 percent this year. India's growth is likely to slow to 4.5 percent.

All told, the lost output could be as high as $4 trillion this year alone, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner estimated.

Besides trillions in lost business, a sinking world economy means fewer trade opportunities and higher unemployment. It raises the odds more people will fall into poverty, go hungry or lose their homes. And while keeping a lid on interest rates and consumer prices, the global recession increases the risk of deflation, which would drag down prices and wages, making it harder for people to make payments on their debt.

The jobless rate in the United States is expected to average 8.9 percent this year and climb to 10.1 percent next year, the IMF said.

In Germany, the jobless rate is expected to average 9 percent this year and 10.8 percent next year. Britain's unemployment rate is projected to rise to 7.4 percent this year and to 9.2 percent next year.

Brian Bethune, economist at IHS Global Insight, estimates that at least 10 million jobs could be lost this year, mostly in the United States and Europe, because of sinking global economic activity.

He and other economists said the 1.3 percent projected decline would be the first in roughly 60 years. In a report issued in mid-March, the IMF predicted global activity would contract this year "for the first time in 60 years," though it didn't offer a precise estimate then.

Next year, the IMF predicts the world economy will grow again — but just 1.9 percent. It said this would be consistent with its findings that economic recoveries after financial crises "are significantly slower" than ordinary recoveries typically are.

All those factors tend to weigh against prospects "for a speedy turnaround," the IMF said.

In 2010, the IMF predicts the U.S. economy will be flat, neither shrinking nor growing. Germany's and Britain's economies, meanwhile, will shrink less — by 1 percent and 0.4 percent respectively — it estimates.

Others countries, such as Japan, Russia, Canada and Mexico are projected to grow again. And China and India should pick up speed.

The financial crisis erupted in the United States in August 2007 and spread around the globe. The crisis entered a tumultuous new phase last fall, shaking confidence in global financial institutions and markets. Total worldwide losses from the financial crisis from 2007 to 2010 could reach nearly $4.1 trillion, the IMF estimated in a separate report Tuesday.

The crisis has led to bank failures, wiped out Lehman Brothers and forced other big institutions, like insurance giant American International Group, to be bailed out by U.S. taxpayers.

And it's triggered radical government interventions — such as the United States' $700 billion financial bailout program and the Federal Reserve's $1.2 trillion effort to lower interest rates and spur spending.

Actions by the United States and government in other countries have helped ease the crisis in some ways. But markets are still not operating normally.

The 185-nation IMF, headquartered in Washington, is the globe's economic rescue squad, providing emergency loans to countries facing financial troubles. It has urged countries to take bolder actions to bolster banks.

The IMF also has pushed countries to work more closely together. It favors coordinating fiscal stimulus efforts through tax reductions or greater government spending to stimulate the appetites of consumers and businesses. And it warned countries to resist the temptation of enacting protectionist trade measures.

"Fiscal policies had made a gigantic difference," said IMF Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard. Without them, the hit to the global economy would have been much greater and pushed it perilously close to "a depression," he added.

Because the world economy won't be back to normal next year or perhaps even in 2011, Blanchard urged countries to spend money on big public works projects — something the Obama administration is doing — to bolster activity.

Bold policy actions could set off a mutually reinforcing "relief rally" in financial markets and a revival in consumer and business confidence, the IMF said in its report. But it remains concerned that these policies won't be enough to break the vicious cycle whereby deteriorating financial institutions feed, in turn, weaker economic conditions.

"The problem is that the longer the downturn continues to deepen, the slimmer the chances that such a strong rebound will occur, as pessimism about the outlook becomes entrenched and balance sheets are damaged further," the IMF said in the report Wednesday.

With the global economy stuck in a recession, the risks of a dangerous bout of deflation — a prolonged decline in prices that can worsen the economy — has risen. The IMF cited a "moderate" risk of deflation in the United States and in the 16 countries that use the euro. It saw a "significant likelihood of deeper price deflation" in Japan.
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Big cuts seen for F-22, other big weapon programs

2009-04-06T18:59:00.002-04:00

I'm telling you, he's making too many changes, somebodies gonna off him!

By ANNE GEARAN, AP Military Writer Anne Gearan, Ap Military Writer 6 mins ago

WASHINGTON – The nation should stop pouring billions into futuristic, super-expensive F-22 jet fighters, pull the plug on new presidential helicopters and put the money into systems U.S. soldiers can use against actual foes, Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared Monday.

Major overhaul plans laid out by the Obama administration's Pentagon chief would slash several giant weapons programs — and thousands of civilian jobs that go with them. With recession unemployment rising, Congress may balk at many of the cuts in Gates' proposed $534 billion budget for the coming year.

Still, despite all the talk of cuts, the total figure would rise from $513 billion for 2009, and Gates spoke of using money more wisely, not asking for less.

Gates, a holdover from the Bush administration, said he is gearing Pentagon buying plans to the smaller, lower-tech battlefields the military is facing now and expects in coming years. He also said he hopes lawmakers will resist temptations to save outdated system that keep defense plants humming in their home districts.

The Pentagon, he said, wants to move away from both outdated weapons systems conceived in the Cold War and futuristic programs aimed at super-sophisticated foes.

Gates said he would expand spending on equipment that targets insurgents, such as $2 billion more on surveillance and reconnaissance equipment. That would include funding for 50 new Predator drones such as those that have rained down missiles on militants hiding along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

"We must rebalance this department's programs in order to institutionalize and finance our capabilities to fight the wars we are in today and the scenarios we are most likely to face in the years ahead," he said.

Major programs facing cuts include the F-22 Raptor, the military's most expensive fighter plane at $140 million apiece. An action movie come to life, sleek, fast and nearly invisible, the Raptor is ill-suited to deterring roadside bombs in Iraq or hunting insurgents who vanish into the Afghan mountains.

Gates says the Pentagon won't continue the F-22 program beyond 187 planes already planned. Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed, the nation's largest defense contractor, has said almost 95,000 jobs could be at stake.

Gates also said no to a new fleet of Marine One presidential helicopters — with a price tag of $13 billion, more than double the original budget. He said new helicopters would be needed at some point but he wants time to figure out a better solution.

A $160 billion Army system of combat vehicles, flying sensors and bomb-hunting robots would be reduced, too, as would plans to build a shield of missile interceptors to defend against attacks by rogue countries. The Navy would revamp plans to buy new destroyers.

A new communications satellite would be scrapped, and a program for a new Air Force transport plane would be ended.

Congress reacted cautiously.

Large defense contractors and their supporters on Capitol Hill scrambled to assess how the changes would affect them. Gates had demanded total secrecy during weeks of Pentagon discussions, even requiring senior military officers to swear in writing that they would not talk out of school.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, called the proposals an important and overdue attempt to balance want and need at the Defense Department.

"However, the committee will carefully review the department's recommendations in the context of current and future threats when we receive the detailed fiscal year 2010 budget request," Murtha said.

Some programs would grow.

Gates proposed speeding up production of the F-35 fighter jet. That program could end up costing $1 trillion to manufacture and maintain 2,443 planes. The military would buy more speedy ships that can operate close in to land. And more money would be spent outfitting special forces troops who can hunt down insurgents.

The recommendations are the product of Gates' frustration at weapons systems that take on lives of their own, even when their missions are no longer relevant or costs balloon. The frustration extends to military services and defense contractors accustomed to measuring success by how big a piece of the budget pie they can claim.

The Pentagon said it could not predict how much money Gates' proposals might save, if any. Gates read off a hit list of programs to be canceled or trimmed, but the Pentagon did not release details.

___

Associated Press writers Stephen A. Manning and Pauline Jelinek contributed to this report.
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Plantinga - Dennett Debate at the Pacific APA

2009-04-01T00:26:00.001-04:00

An Opinionated Play-by-Play of the Plantinga-Dennett Exchange
By Andrew Moon on February 23, 2009 2:52 PM

A friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous took an account of the dialogue between Plantinga and Dennett at last weekend's APA. I know that many were interested in this, so I am copy/pasting it below. The account is opinionated (i.e., the author openly expresses his perspective on what went on throughout the account), and it is heavily sided in favor of Plantinga and against Dennett. So I welcome any disagreements about what went on in the comments section.

How important was such a meeting, and of what worth is discussion about it? Did Plantinga or Dennett take away anything new by way of argument or philosophy from the meeting? Probably not. Did anybody in the audience learn anything new by way of argument or philosophy? Maybe; perhaps some people there never heard some of Plantinga's arguments, and they learned something new.

So I'm not sure how important the meeting was from the standpoint of philosophy. But I'm interested in reading/hearing discussion about the meeting to get a better idea of how theism and atheism are perceived by the philosophical community. I'm curious to hear how atheists might have perceived what went on at the meeting. So comments from that standpoint (and not necessarily only that standpoint) are welcome.

The Account

For those of you who do not know, on February 21st, the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association - the main professional body of American philosophers - hosted a kind of debate. I say "kind of debate" because one philosopher gave a paper, the other commented and the first philosopher replied and the floor opened for questions. But in fact the session was a debate.

The debate was between Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett. Plantinga is one of the founders of the Society of Christian Philosophers and one of the fathers of the current desecularization of philosophy. He is widely regarded - even by his critics - as one of the finest epistemologists of the last fifty years and one of the finest philosophers of religion since the Medieval period. Daniel Dennett is one of the New Atheists and is a well-known proponent of atheistic Darwinism and critic of religion. He is widely regarded - even by his critics - as one of the most important early philosophers of mind that opened the field to cognitive science and evolutionary biology. He has contributed enormously to the serious study of the mind and its relationship to the brain. Both philosophers are over sixty and perhaps at the height of their philosophical powers. They have also faced off before but, as far as I know, not in person.

Plantinga was the presenter. The session asked the question of whether science and religion were compatible. Plantinga argues that they are and that in fact the scientific theory taken to be most incompatible with religion - evolutionary theory - is not only compatible with Christian theism (the religious view Plantinga defends) but is incompatible with Christian theism's most serious opponent in the scientific world - naturalism. Naturalism is the view that physics and the sciences can give a complete description of reality. Plantinga defines it as the view that there is no God or anything like God.

I was at the talk. It was packed with professional philosophers and graduate students in philosophy, most of whom sided with Dennett. I wrote live comments on the debate/session. I prefer to remain anonymous for various reasons, in particular because I am inclined towards Plantinga's position over Dennett's and were this to become well-known it could damage or destroy my career in analytic philosophy. This is something I prefer not to put my family through. I almost didn't publish these comments at all, but as far as I could tell, this would be the only public record of the discussion.

Friends, if you can identify me, I request that you keep my identity secret. I am sharing my thoughts as a service to the philosophical community and all those who have an interest in such debates. But I prefer not to suffer at the hands of my ardently secular colleagues. This is not to say that all secular analytic philosophers are this way; they most certainly are not. But enough of them are that I cannot risk being known publicly.

The talk began at 2:30 pm on Saturday, February 21st, 2009 in the Palmerhouse Hilton in downtown Chicago in the Crystal Room on the third floor. I got there early. What follows are my live thoughts. All opinions are my own. And while I am inclined towards Plantinga's position, I was once a Dennettian and still admire much of his work. I tried to go in with an open-mind and be even-handed. Perhaps I was unsuccessful, but at least I tried.

2:18 pm - The room was moved because the original room was full thirty minutes before the talk. People rushed down the stairs in a hotel full of elevators. There's a kind of excitement in the room and it's not clear the Christian to non-Christian ratio. Dennett has arrived and is setting up his equipment. It seems appropriate somehow that Dennett would be using technological equipment where Plantinga gives a more traditional sort of talk.

2:20 pm - Plantinga enters. The tension between the titans fills the room.

2:21 pm - No immediate greeting between the two figures. Dennett stares at his computer. It is awkward.

2:22 pm - Plantinga's handouts begin to be passed around. Surely there won't be enough.

2:23 pm - The room is overflowing. Numerous prominent philosophers on both sides are here. It's fascinating that a room full of philosophers should be so divided on this issue. It is perhaps the first time in centuries that Christians have been such a high concentration of professional philosophers.

2:24 pm - I can't find an electrical outlet, but my new little laptop will keep on going throughout the initial remarks. I apologize if I cut out during the Q&A.

2:25 pm - Still no eye contact. Both figures appear uncomfortable. I'm probably reading into their body language, but they seem to realize that something hangs on the match.

2:27 pm - Plantinga attempts to make eye contact with Dennett. Dennett still refuses.

2:28 pm - Dean Zimmerman comes to speak with Plantinga. He's a reminder to me that the Christians have some heavy hitters intellectually. Michael Tooley, a prominent secularist, is here. So is Eleanore Stump, a prominent Christian philosopher and known worldwide for her expertise in Medieval philosophy, particular Aquinas. Peter Van Inwagen, president of the Central Division is here. For those who don't know, he is one of the most prominent metaphysician alive and is an Anglican.

2:29 pm - Dennett and Plantinga make awkward attempts at conversation. Dennett still seems uninterested. I wonder what this foreshadows. It is almost time for the talk to begin. The room is stuffed like sardines.

2:30 pm - Organizer tries to get the original group in the session to leave to make room. It is clear that no one will leave - a facile attempt. They won't move us again.

2:31 pm - The floor in the area around the podium fills up.

2:32 pm - Brian Leiter, a prominent secularist, well-known Nietzsche scholar, philosopher of law, who is quite famous/infamous for his internet blog, enters the room in the back. I am surprised he came.

2:33 pm - Dennett is having technical difficulties.

2:34 pm - The session begins. Plantinga is speaking and Dennett is replying. There will be a half hour of questions after an hour of 'going at it', to use the host's words. Dennett notably doesn't clap for Plantinga.

2:35 pm - Plantinga begins to speak. He looks like Abraham Lincoln. Dennett looks like Santa Claus. Feel free to imagine these two as those characters.

2:36 pm - Plantinga begins to define his terms. He will speak about whether theistic belief is compatible with science. Christian belief is the intersection of the Christian creeds. He will argue that there is no conflict between theistic religion and science.

2:37 pm - Plantinga discusses possible sources of incompatibility. You probably are aware of these standard lines. They are going by too quickly for me to record in my cramped position.

2:38 pm - Plantinga argues that contemporary evolutionary theory isn't incompatible with theistic belief. But instead is in conflict with naturalism. He also thinks that theistic religion could be rational even if science conflicted with it (this last is particularly controversial claim, to my mind).

2:39 pm - The conflict is between naturalism and science. Dennett is smirking under his grand beard. If Plantinga missteps his description of evolution, Dennett is going to pounce on him. Ultimately the argument doesn't quite hinge on all the details of how evolution occurs, so I hope this does not side-track them.

2:40 pm - There is no conflict between theism and the central tenets of Darwinism. God could have used evolutionary mechanisms to create the world.

2:41 pm - God intended to create creatures though, with a moral sense, free will and so on. This intention appears incompatible with Darwinism, but it isn't. God could have caused random mutation (This initially strikes me as odd, but makes sense later.)

2:42 pm - Theism and evolution are only incompatible if evolution is essentially unguided. And some assert that the assumption of unguidedness is essential to evolutionary theory. (Why would they make this additional, non-scientific but metaphysical claim? Why bother to provoke?)

2:44 pm - Plantinga is talking about Gould. I missed the point. Sorry!

2:45 pm - Are random mutations really compatible with theism? We don't have to understand randomness as incompatible with theism.

2:46 pm - I have gone from 75% to 65% on my battery. Ack!

2:47 pm - Don't mix naturalistic metaphysics with science, says Plantinga. Naturalism is incompatible with theism by definition but not evolution.

2:48 pm - Plantinga makes witty joke. He and Dennett both have their own unique style of wit. They are hard to describe. Plantinga has the dry wit of a lighthearted grandfather. Dennett's wit is more like that of someone aiming directly at communicating concepts in the most creative way he can. Plantinga seems more concerned with careful, methodical, clear philosophy, Dennett with exciting, compelling, shocking ideas. Perhaps this helps explain why they have the positions they do.

2:50 pm - Plantinga cites Dawkins as saying that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually satisfied atheist. Dennett nods vigorously.

2:51 pm - Plantinga mentions Michael Behe, calls the argument serious. Dennett appears stunned, understandably. It's not clear whether Plantinga intended to be provocative by speaking up for this 'much maligned' intelligent design theorist. Plantinga says the ID argument is compelling but inconclusive as the complexity of the cell is more probable on theism than naturalism (but it isn't clear how much more).

2:52 pm - A tendency to believe in God is suggested by evolutionary studies of religion, but Plantinga is shockingly arguing that this makes more sense on theism than naturalism. He briefly mentions the main lines of his book, Warranted Christian Belief.

2:53 pm - The demise of the teleological argument doesn't speak against rational belief in God. This is a standard argument of Plantinga's. He believes that belief in God is properly basic, belief in God is warranted even if the believer has no reason for this belief.

2:54 pm - The apparent waste in evolutionary history isn't incompatible with theism and neither is suffering and death in evolution. It doesn't even speak against it. It's a version of the problem of evil, which Plantinga denies is a defeater for theism. There is no logical incompatibility and it has been hard to state a probabilistic argument from evil. It's not clear what the argument is, particularly as the literature becomes more complex.

2:55 pm - The really good possible worlds all involve divine incarnation and atonement and so all the best worlds have sin and suffering - an old view that many Christian philosophers resist today. He even mentions that outrageous (to the naturalist) idea that the demons are part of the errors in human development. Dennett is clearly stunned and amused. He probably thinks Plantinga's claims are insane or at least silly. Plantinga's orthodoxy is completely unabashed. It is commendable that he is wholly without embarrassment, something rare for a modern Christian. Perhaps it signals an attitude to come.

2:58 pm - While naturalistic evolution may be simpler than theistic evolution, this is not an all things considered defeater. There are many propositions conjuncted here to which a probability is assigned. The argument is becoming complicated but the effect is that probabilistic judgments become very difficult when evaluating alternative large conjunctions of propositions.

3:00 pm - The argument is full of probabilistic language. It isn't complicated for the room but it is complicated to live blog.

3:01 pm - A hard problem is explaining the mechanisms of the cell. Plantinga's argument never hinged on this view before. He's arguing this, perhaps, to try to show that even the most maligned arguments for theism have something to them. Dennett will be unaware that Plantinga didn't advance these 'bad' arguments all along. Remember: Plantinga's argument is merely that the complexity of the cell is more likely on theism than naturalism. This is a very different claim than what most understand the ID argument to be. It's not a proof of theism but a comparative probabilistic judgment. The argument would work even if the complexity of the cell were 70% likely on naturalism so long as it is significantly more likely on theism.

3:03 pm - To be honest, I think Plantinga would do better not to be so flagrant in his defense of these much maligned arguments, as it shuts off the minds of those he hopes to convince. I can see the value, but why not just make the solid arguments that don't cause naturalists to scoff?

3:04 pm - He does say, however, that from agnosticism the design argument isn't necessarily any good. The theist already accepts theism. The claim is merely that the theist's view is confirmed more by evolutionary biology than the naturalist's view is. Note though, that he is not yet to the point of providing defeaters for the conjunction of theism and naturalism. He is still arguing that evolution and theism are not incompatible. Also remember that Plantinga makes these probabilistic claims tentatively.

3:06 pm - Just because there is scientific evidence against theism doesn't necessarily refute theism or provide defeaters. Theism may have evidence on its behalf or it may have a wholly different source of warrant. If the latter is true, then the warrant for theism may outweigh scientific evidence. The Christian doesn't have to change her views according to current science.

3:08 pm - Now Plantinga approaches the defeater for naturalism. He claims that naturalism is a quasi-religion and science contradicts it. One cannot rationally accept both naturalism and evolution.

3:09 pm - Naturalism usually is tied to materialism, so for now he will tie them together.

3:10 pm - The key claim: the probability that our faculties track the truth on theistic evolution is much higher than it is on naturalistic evolution. Plantinga is now reviewing the formal probability theory that the argument appeals to.

3:11 pm - Plantinga continues to give the argument. Basically, naturalistic evolution selects for belief faculties which form beliefs that track survival - and loosely. But an entirely false set of beliefs might track survival. Naturalistic evolution therefore has no tendency to select for true beliefs. I am radically simplifying the argument; please forgive me.

3:13 pm - Plantinga is arguing that his argument will work on a variety of versions of physicalism, even on a view that mental states supervene on physical states. It is worth noting that theism and materialism are compatible and so materialism could be true. It is the conjunction of naturalism with evolution that causes the problem.

3:15 pm - Plantinga argues, following Pat Churchland, that in evolution "Truth, whatever that is, gets the hindmost." Dennett is shaking his head and continues to appear amused. Imagine Santa with a sense for the absurd and ironic and a strong snarky streak. Less appealing, admittedly, but still an interesting character.

3:17 pm - I have heard the Plantinga argument from sites on the internet. I'm honestly at a loss to predict how Dennett will reply. I saw him discussing what appeared to be his comments with Stephanie Lewis (the wife of the late, great metaphysician, David Lewis). Perhaps he has something interesting up his sleeve. I will be disappointed if he doesn't.

3:18 pm - Plantinga holds that if our faculties aren't truth-tracking then our belief in evolution has a defeater. As a result, we should reject the conjunction of naturalism and evolution.

3:19 pm - Plantinga is finished. Dennett claps! He is eager to begin.

3:20 pm - Dennett is going to use powerpoint to reply to Plantinga. Dennett is a very large man. Not fat, but very large. Plantinga is tall but his form is not imposing. Dennett is going to argue that Plantinga makes some true claims. Evolution is compatible with theism. We don't have to have a conception of randomness that is incompatible with theism.

3:21 pm - He is quoting himself. His prose is very cute. He is arguing that he agrees with Plantinga but that Plantinga's claims don't support his [Plantinga's] conclusion. How do we tell the difference, say, between bred animals and unbred animals? How would Martian scientists tell? Dennett is getting laughs, and his strategy is interesting, if I understand it.

3:22 pm - It has been over an hour and I am at 50%. I think I will make it.

3:23 pm - Dennett argues that it is hard to tell what is designed and what isn't. He has some really great examples. He is true to form, very amusing. Plantingian dry wit vs. Dennettian cuteness. My sense for the laughter indicates that Dennett's supporters are more numerous. Not a surprise. Predictably, each figure gets laughs from their people.

3:24 pm - You can see where Plantinga is going in his arguments, which is a virtue. With Dennett, he is building up to a shock. This is also cool. I like both.

3:26 pm - A failure of imagination is not an insight into reality, a point Dennett makes against philosophers all the time.

3:26 pm - Here comes the punch line - the theistic hypothesis can't be refuted. But so what? It is independently unlikely. If we can account for evolution without the divine, then we should accept it. Even if we found user's manuals in junk DNA, this wouldn't show that natural selection isn't the answer, as we could have been tampered with by naturalistic intelligence long ago.

3:27 pm - Contemporary evolutionary theory can't rule out ID. "Except on grounds that it is an entirely gratuitous fantasy." Is the punchline an insult?! I am concerned that Dennett is not yet addressing Plantinga's argument.

3:29 pm - Sure, the intelligent theist can keep going on believing. He calls theistic belief a fairy tale. Now he's getting explicitly insulting. He thinks theistic belief can corrupt our common epistemological fabric and involve theism into politics. He shows a slide mocking the eschatological views of Christians. He calls theism an unrespectable position, and compares it to astrology. He says it is irrational and doesn't deserve respect. He gets laughs. He doesn't look good to the theists. Once he got nasty, a cold pall covered the room. He compares theism to holocaust deniers and things have gone off the rails. This is outrageous. All Plantinga must do to beat Dennett now is to reply with grace. For Plantingian dry wit, this is easy.

3:32 pm - "Is Plantinga's theism in any better position than these other fantasies?" He's going to create a Plantinga-guided natural selection. It is hard to explain, but the argument basically mocks Plantinga. I am incensed. The response is a long string of insults, and little more. This is pathetic. I had more faith in Dennett. He is just making the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument and getting laughs from real, intolerant jerks. It is going on and on. Sigh. I wanted this to be interesting! Dennett does not understand what a disservice he does his cause by not taking his smartest opponents seriously. He will lose thoughtful acolytes as a result.

3:38 pm - Now he moves to assess Plantinga's claim that random mutation is not incompatible with theism. He then moves to the third claim that Plantinga asserts that Dennett agrees with but is concerned to mock.

3:40 pm - We are at 43%. Dennett continues to insult. I wonder if any Christian philosophers will go after Dennett. If they respond with firm, but kind replies, they will expose Dennett's rudeness effectively. Dennett has made himself extremely vulnerable because he is mocking Plantinga, who is arguably one of the finest epistemologists of the last fifty years.

3:41 pm - Plantinga can't champion Behe and Dennett is going to mock him. I thought so. Behe is a transparent concoction of fantasy, etc. Behe looks like a theologian without naturalism. Dennett claims that Plantinga's denial of naturalism makes Behe looks worse. Dennett recounts Plantinga and Peter Van Inwagen's invitation to debate Behe in 1997. He is seriously mocking not only Plantinga but Van Inwagen as well. He thought the Behe book was a joke and this made Plantinga and Van Inwagen look bad.

3:43 pm - Dennett is going after Plantinga by means of Behe. Dennett is now going after Plantinga's view that he has the mental ability to make the relevant probabilistic judgment about the probabilities of the cells. Dennett thinks that he is making Plantinga look very, very bad. But this is far from clear. For those on the fence, they will likely think Dennett is being a serious jerk.

3:45 pm - Dennett is now attacking Behe. He has an interesting claim that the probability of trusting Behe's probability judgment is quite low. This is a bit specious, given that Plantinga has other means of making the probability judgment. Again, all he needs to do is judge that the probability of cell complexity is higher on theism than naturalism. It appears that Dennett's reply is that Plantinga has no justifiable method of making the relevant probability judgments. There's a subtle implication that because Plantinga isn't a scientist he should shut up.

3:48 pm - The room is quiet save some snickering, presumably by naturalists. Dennett has effectively made the discussion ideological. Even at most lowest estimation of Dennett, I never thought he would go so far.

3:49 pm - Dennett now goes after Plantinga's argument that naturalism has a defeater. Finally! Dennett thinks the claim that probability that our faculties track the truth on naturalism is low is false. He thinks we can use reverse engineering to figure out how evolution tracks the truth. So far, this does not address Plantinga's point but I am still open, though a bit upset by Dennett's truly nasty comments.

3:50 pm - Evolution can design syntactic engines that track the truth. We need high reliability devices in the biosphere to evolve. Words can evolve and they can represent our reasons. Plantinga is talking about sensory faculties though. It is also still possible that even with the evolution of words we can still be substantially misled by the quality of our faculties.

3:52 pm - I have just realized that Dennett is taking far too long. The session is supposed to end in 8 minutes. Dennett argues that naturalism is an alternative religion. Dennett is ending with a joke. He is now going after the Christian fish. It is clear that something terrible is coming. Dennett tried to come up with an alternative to traditional Christian Ictus. He notes that it is an acronym and so he tries to come up with a latin acronym for Darwin. It translates as follows: "Destroy the author of things to discover the nature of the universe." This was his last response. Basically, he is talking about murdering God. Dennett has revealed a deep wickedness in his character. I will never take him seriously as a philosopher again.

3:55 pm - Plantinga begins. He claims that he isn't clear as to how what Dennett said bore on Plantinga's claim. This is true Plantinga. He first asks what the argument is. He is unphased and was clearly prepared for this. He is exposing the point that Dennett only told stories and really didn't make an argument against Plantinga's claim. This is a wonderful way to reply. Ignore the profound insults that culminated in a suggestion that we kill God to understand the universe. Appear un-phased and focus on the philosophy. Dennett was classless. Plantinga is only focusing on the argument. A Goliath ad hominem attack is felled by the simple stone of careful analysis.

3:59 pm - It is not clear what the analogy is between God and Superman and other silly beings. He is just suggesting that there is no similarity between God and Superman, as Dennett claimed. Note that this strategy is very subtle. He is addressing the argument in simple terms and showing gradually that there was nothing to Dennett's claims. Note that above I had trouble understanding Dennett's arguments, but not Plantinga's. I thought that was just me but now it is clear that Dennett built a house of cards.

4:01 pm - I am at 33%. I don't know if I will make it. Plantinga has a different view about the Behe experience. He thought Behe held his own. Plantinga was disappointed with Dennett's reply to Plantinga's argument.

4:02 pm - Plantinga thinks Dennett didn't mention the argument. Dennett interrupts and says he mentioned premise 1. Plantinga says, "Yes, Dennett did mention premise 1, and I am grateful for that." The room erupted in laughter. I added my own guffaw. Dennett is collapsing and is clearly furious. It is clear that Dennett just didn't make any arguments.

4:04 pm - Questions begin. The first question comes from the front. The guy stands. He is having trouble articulating his question. He argues that having truth-reliable faculties is selected for. This is an easy claim for Plantinga to strike down. Plantinga makes the reply that faculties are indeed adapative but that truth-tracking isn't essential to adaptiveness.

4:08 pm - Question to Dennett about the Superman hypothesis. There are many smart Christians in the room who believe in God rather than Superman and doesn't that make the difference? Dennett is making the claim that people maintain their faith without rational belief. He is insulting every Christian in the room by assuming that their beliefs can be explained away as irrational.

4:10 pm - Question about some debate at Baylor. The man is talking about his own talk and discussion with Behe. We should be suspicious of Behe's intellectual quality, he claims. He is then going after the evolutionary argument against naturalism. He defends the view that the content of mental states is fixed by causation. I realize that the man is Michael Tooley, a famous secular philosopher. (Why did he spend his question telling a story about himself? How self-indulgent?) He thinks that the theory of mental state content shows that the probability of truth-tracking on naturalism is high. It is not clear to me why. Couldn't causality lead to systematically false but adaptive beliefs? Plantinga makes this point.

4:13 pm - Dennett interrupts and argues to combat Plantinga's wit. Plantinga doesn't resist. Now Dennett is actually talking about the argument. But he still is not addressing the point. If a mental state ceases to track truth, then it won't be adaptive, he claims.

4:15 pm - I have decided to try to ask a question but I didn't have my hand up soon enough. I was going to try to press Dennett on the substance of Plantinga's argument. The next question addresses the first premise and argues that it proves too much, that the probability of all naturalistic beliefs is low and that this is weird.

4:17 pm - Questions continue and they don't address Plantinga's argument. The last question concerns why we should think that the probability of naturalism is high. How does Dennett's assign probabilities to metaphysical positions? That seems weird, the questioner notes. This is an interesting question.

4:21 pm - Dennett responds by arguing that we have an undercutting defeater from theism from the evolutionary scientific study of religion.

It is clear that most in the room are naturalists. But the questions were not acrimonious. Dennett was the only one who was mean. I don't know how most people reacted to it. I have to admit that I think Dennett behaved like a serious jerk. I am extremely disappointed in his reply to Plantinga. It is clear that this is a man with serious character defects.

Post-script: It has been about ten minutes since the session ended. I spoke to Peter Van Inwagen about the talk and he said it was an expected performance and that while it was a clash of worldviews, it was an interesting clash in two styles of doing philosophy. Initially, I thought to myself, "Yeah, Plantinga thinks philosophy is about arguments; Dennett thinks it is about stories." But on further reflection I realized that Van Inwagen had a point. Dennett believes that science can tell us many things about metaphysics and epistemology, that we work from science to these positions. Plantinga thinks of these matters rather differently.

On another note, I walked around and listened to various conversations (not eavesdropping really, just listening for loud reactions to the session). The Christian philosophers were particularly interesting. They were not upset, surprised or even moved. They were wholly unphased. They were so unphased that they weren't even discussing the session. I was floored at Dennett's behavior but they reacted as if Dennett's hateful, childish behavior was to be expected. I thought they would be upset, but from what I can tell they simply expected Dennett to compare theistic belief to holocaust denial and to advocate murdering the Almighty. I guess I was wrong to expect more from him.

In my estimation, Plantinga won hands down because Dennett savagely mocked Plantinga rather than taking him seriously. Plantinga focused on the argument, and Dennett engaged in ridicule. It is safe to say that Dennett only made himself look bad along with those few nasty naturalists that were snickering at Plantinga. The Christians engaged in no analogous behavior. More engagements like this will only expand the ranks of Christian philosophers and increase the pace of academic philosophy's desecularization.

Noel replied that:

Since Fritz sent out the Plantinga-Dennett e-mail with the prosblogion link, I thought some of you might be interested to hear from a student (me) in our department (instead of those posting on prosblogion, with the exception of James!). So here is my short rough-and-ready take:

Plantinga’s purpose was three-fold. 1) Establish that evolution is compatible with Christian (C) theism, 2) that evolution is more probable given C-theism than is naturalism, and 3) that the conjunction of naturalism and evolution entails a defeater for both naturalism and evolution (those familiar with Plantinga will note that Plantinga has been arguing for these three theses for many years).

Dennett responded to 1) by granting the compatibility of C-theism and evolution, but argued that Superman-ism (the theses that Superman’s father (I forgot his name) guided evolution) is likewise compatible with evolution thus showing the irrelevance of 1). However, it is not entirely clear to me how Dennett’s response is relevant here for two reasons: i) Plantinga is not arguing that we have reason to believe in C-theism simply because it is compatible with evolution. If he were, then Dennett’s argument would be devastating. But he’s not, so its not. ii) This much should be expected from Plantinga since many (C-theists and non-theists alike) take evolution and C-theism to be incompatible (most likely because of Genesis 1-2). Even if many do see them as compatible, many don’t and so Plantinga’s argument for 1) is not without justification.

Plantinga’s argument for 2) is multifaceted. It included arguments purporting to show that the probability of there being rational agents was higher given C-theism than it was given naturalism, teleological arguments, that okhamist arguments against the need to postulate God do not work, etc. Many of these arguments relied on much of Plantinga’s work in epistemology (for example, Plantinga argues that although teleological arguments do not establish the existence of God, the very same line of reasoning used in order to show that we have knowledge of other minds is the same as that used in teleological arguments. So by parity of reasoning, if belief in other minds is rational, then so is belief in God. But surely the former is rational, and therefore so is the latter.) and in all fairness, one could not reasonably ask Dennett to respond to each one. I personally think Plantinga would have fared better had he presented only one of these arguments
and developed it a bit more.

I will comment here only on one of Dennett’s arguments: Dennett provided a number of examples were in one instance something was not designed and in other it was, but that telling which one was and was not designed was quite hard if not do-able. From this it seemed as if Dennett wanted to say that inferences made on the basis of something looking as if it had been designed to that very thing being designed are bad inferences (although, if my memory serves me correctly, he never did say that outright). I find this argument thoroughly unconvincing. Take a state of affairs in which you hallucinate and “see” an oasis out in the desert and one where you do not hallucinate and really do see an oasis. Can you tell which one was the veridical experience and which one was not purely on the basis of those experiences? I do not see how? Does this serve to undermine the general reliability of your sense perceptions or the general reliability of there
being an oasis when you perceive one? Hardly. The mere fact that Dennett can give an example where its hard to tell, on the basis of simple observation, whether or not x has F, does very little in undermining our general reliability in being able to determine whether or not x has F. Of course, one could respond by saying that you could go and check to see if there really is an oasis there. But I do not see why this option is not left open in those scenarios in which it is hard to tell, merely by simple observation, whether or not the object in question has been designed (there is, after all, a science to detecting design).

To be sure, just because Dennett’s argument, as given, is a non sequitur, it does not follow that Dennett does not have the makings for a serious one. Indeed, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and because Plantinga’s arguments were cursory and numerous, perhaps charges similar to the one I gave against Dennett could be leveled at Plantinga.

I do not have much to say with respect to Plantinga’s argument for 3) except that it is far from clear that he has been refuted. There is a book devoted to his argument (which includes some heavy hitters like Jerry Fodor, Ernest Sosa, Trenton Merricks, Michael Bergmann, William Alston, and Tim O’Connor), which is evidence enough that it warrants much discussion (See ‘Naturalism Defeated? Essays On Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism’).

Dennett’s response to Plantinga here was quite unclear to me (and to Plantinga as well) which, in and of itself, says little about the philosophical adequacy of Dennett’s response. But precisely because it was unclear to me, it follows, for me, that Dennett’s response was at best inconclusive. That is, it follows, for me, that Plantinga was not at all embarrassed (As it did for many other people i talked to after the exchange).

Some final notes:

A) I would like to make clear that the real debate was not over evolution and C-theism, but over naturalism and C-theism. This could have easily been overlooked since there was much discussion over evolution's compatibility with C-theism.

B) It would have been nice if Dennett gave some arguments for why naturalism is the superior worldview. Instead, Dennett constantly compared C-theism to superman-ism, calling C-theism a fantastic story without any rational plausibility. It is clear that Dennett is largely ignorant with respect to the literature on arguments for and against the existence of God. Some of the philosophers who work in this area and are the biggest critics of C-theism (Paul Draper, Graham Oppy, William Rowe, and are very own, Quentin Smith) find it a most rational, plausible, worldview, unlike superman-ism, even if they think it a false worldview.

C) As Fritz said, “At any rate, none of this has to do with any of the substantive conclusions, only the argumentative and dialectical structures employed. Regardless, it was clearly an important session and one that was entertaining to attend” (emphasis on ‘entertaining’). Yea, verily, and amen!

Cheers!
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MasterPath

2009-03-18T12:54:00.001-04:00

This was left by randi and richard, who are apart of the kiva.org Inspiration lending team that I am a part of. i thought it was interesting enough to pass on.
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Obama's Education Reform

2009-03-10T14:19:00.000-04:00

Obama, taking on unions, backs teacher merit pay
By PHILIP ELLIOTT, Associated Press Writer Philip Elliott, Associated Press Writer 25 mins ago

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama embraced merit pay for teachers Tuesday in spelling out a vision of education that will almost certainly alienate union backers.

A strategy that ties teacher pay to student performance has for years been anathema to teachers' unions, a powerful force in the Democratic Party. These unions also are wary of charter schools, nontraditional educational systems that they believe compete with traditional schools for tax dollars.

Obama, however, also spoke favorably of charter schools, saying that where they work, they should be encouraged.

He did acknowledge in his speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce that his proposals could meet heavy resistance in both political parties.

"Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom," he said, delivering the first major education speech of his presidency. "Too many in the Republican Party have opposed new investments in early education, despite compelling evidence of its importance."

But he argued that a far-reaching overhaul of the nation's education system is an economic imperative that can't wait, despite the urgency of the financial crisis and other pressing issues.

"Despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us," Obama said. "The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy, and unacceptable for our children. We cannot afford to let it continue. What is at stake is nothing less than the American dream."

Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, said the union would "embrace the goals and aspirations outlined today by President Obama."

"Teachers want to make a difference in kids' lives, and they appreciate a president who shares that goal and will spend his political capital to provide the resources to make it happen," she said. "As with any public policy, the devil is in the details, and it is important that teachers' voices are heard."

The ideas the president promoted were nearly all elements of his campaign platform last year. He only barely mentioned the reauthorization of the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act, which introduced sweeping reforms that schools are struggling to meet without the funding to match. Obama said his administration would "later this year" ensure that schools get the funding they need and that the money is conditioned on results.

Among the principles Obama laid out were:

_Challenging states to adopt world-class standards rather than a specific standard. Obama's economic stimulus plan includes a $5 billion incentive fund to reward states for, among other things, boosting the quality of standards and state tests, and the president said the Education Department would create a fund to invest in innovation.

_Improved pre-kindergarten programs, including $5 billion in the stimulus plan to grow Head Start, expand child care access and do more for children with special needs. He also said he would offer 55,000 first-time parents regular visits from trained nurses and said that states that develop cutting-edge plans to raise the quality of early learning programs would get an Early Learning Challenge Grant, if Congress approves the new program.

_Reducing student dropout rates. To students, Obama said: "Don't even think about dropping out of school." But he said that reducing the dropout rates also requires turning around the worst schools, something he asked lawmakers, parents and teachers to make "our collective responsibility as Americans."

_Repeating his call for everyone to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training, with the goal of highest proportion of college graduates in the world by the year 2020.

On charter schools, he said the caps instituted by some states on how many are allowed aren't "good for our children, our economy, or our country."

Obama also spoke at length about what he described his policy toward teachers, what he called an `unprecedented commitment to ensure that anyone entrusted with educating our children is doing the job as well as it can be done." In up to 150 more school districts, Obama said, teachers will get mentoring, more money for improved student achievement and new responsibilities.Also, Obama said, "We need to make sure our students have the teacher they need to be successful. That means states and school districts taking steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom. Let me be clear: if a teacher is given a chance but still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching."

The president acknowledged that a rethinking of the traditional American school day may not be welcome — "not in my family, and probably not in yours" — but is critical.

"The challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom," Obama said. "If they can do that in South Korea, we can do it right here in the United States of America."

After the speech, Obama stopped at a hotel to drop in on another meeting, an already scheduled and ongoing round-table discussion between Education Secretary Arne Duncan and the Council of Chief State School Officers, which involves the heads of education from every state and U.S. territory.
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More Americans say they have no religion

2009-03-09T15:02:00.002-04:00

A wide-ranging study on American religious life found that the Roman Catholic population has been shifting out o of the Northeast to the Southwest, the percentage of Christians in the nation has declined and more people say they have no religion at all.

Fifteen percent of respondents said they had no religion, an increase from 14.2 percent in 2001 and 8.2 percent in 1990, according to the American Religious Identification Survey.

Northern New England surpassed the Pacific Northwest as the least religious region, with Vermont reporting the highest share of those claiming no religion, at 34 percent. Still, the study found that the numbers of Americans with no religion rose in every state.

"No other religious bloc has kept such a pace in every state," the study's authors said.

In the Northeast, self-identified Catholics made up 36 percent of adults last year, down from 43 percent in 1990. At the same time, however, Catholics grew to about one-third of the adult population in California and Texas, and one-quarter of Floridians, largely due to Latino immigration, according to the research.

Nationally, Catholics remain the largest religious group, with 57 million people saying they belong to the church. The tradition gained 11 million followers since 1990, but its share of the population fell by about a percentage point to 25 percent.

Christians who aren't Catholic also are a declining segment of the country.

In 2008, Christians comprised 76 percent of U.S. adults, compared to about 77 percent in 2001 and about 86 percent in 1990. Researchers said the dwindling ranks of mainline Protestants, including Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians, largely explains the shift. Over the last seven years, mainline Protestants dropped from just over 17 percent to 12.9 percent of the population.

The report from The Program on Public Values at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., surveyed 54,461 adults in English or Spanish from February through November of last year. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 0.5 percentage points. The findings are part of a series of studies on American religion by the program that will later look more closely at reasons behind the trends.

The current survey, being released Monday, found traditional organized religion playing less of a role in many lives. Thirty percent of married couples did not have a religious wedding ceremony and 27 percent of respondents said they did not want a religious funeral.

About 12 percent of Americans believe in a higher power but not the personal God at the core of monotheistic faiths. And, since 1990, a slightly greater share of respondents — 1.2 percent — said they were part of new religious movements, including Scientology, Wicca and Santeria.

The study also found signs of a growing influence of churches that either don't belong to a denomination or play down their membership in a religious group.

Respondents who called themselves "non-denominational Christian" grew from 0.1 percent in 1990 to 3.5 percent last year. Congregations that most often use the term are megachurches considered "seeker sensitive." They use rock style music and less structured prayer to attract people who don't usually attend church. Researchers also found a small increase in those who prefer being called evangelical or born-again, rather than claim membership in a denomination.

Evangelical or born-again Americans make up 34 percent of all American adults and 45 percent of all Christians and Catholics, the study found. Researchers found that 18 percent of Catholics consider themselves born-again or evangelical, and nearly 39 percent of mainline Protestants prefer those labels. Many mainline Protestant groups are riven by conflict over how they should interpret what the Bible says about gay relationships, salvation and other issues.

The percentage of Pentecostals remained mostly steady since 1990 at 3.5 percent, a surprising finding considering the dramatic spread of the tradition worldwide. Pentecostals are known for a spirited form of Christianity that includes speaking in tongues and a belief in modern-day miracles.

Mormon numbers also held steady over the period at 1.4 percent of the population, while the number of Jews who described themselves as religiously observant continued to drop, from 1.8 percent in 1990 to 1.2 percent, or 2.7 million people, last year. Researchers plan a broader survey on people who consider themselves culturally Jewish but aren't religious.

The study found that the percentage of Americans who identified themselves as Muslim grew to 0.6 percent of the population, while growth in Eastern religions such as Buddhism slightly slowed.

http://www.americanreligionsurvey-aris.org/

Is this a Good or a Bad Choice?

2009-02-23T04:01:00.002-05:00

I don't know yet
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Curious?

2009-02-18T02:42:00.000-05:00

If something seems to good to be true, it usually is.
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25 people to blame for the economic crisis

2009-02-17T12:03:00.001-05:00

Bill swears it wasn't him!!!!
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Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

2009-02-09T23:21:00.001-05:00

absolutely hilarious!
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Diamond Emanationism

2009-01-30T03:06:00.007-05:00

I think that diamonds would be a good example to explain the hierarchy of being according to emanationism. With it's inclusions and color scales, and with the facets within the diamond being able to shine and reflect more or less light, diamonds could be used to explain both the distinctions between the levels in the facets, leo diamonds are a higher level of complexity than regular diamonds. this diamond complexity is analogous to the increasing complexity the closer the emanation gets to the absolute, because this complexity is required to withstand the light from the Absolute better. I don't know if Pseudo-Dionysius ever talked about the complexity of the emanation being a necessary desiderata for the layering of the emanations, the simplest at the bottom and the most complex and pure at the top, the purity is where the inclusions nad the color comes inot play. i could write about lots of different stuff tonight, like his dual mode theory of existence, as a physical being and as a soul, fused yet distinct, eternally united in the Absolute Godhead or Super-Essence. I think that I've finally found what I am, a Pseudo-Dionysian Christian, but I say that with all my mystics, i'm such a mystical whore, aren't I?

yes, of course they did,Emanationists such as Pythagoras, Plotinus, Gautam Buddha, and others argued that complex patterns in nature were a natural consequence of procession from the One (Hen, Absolute)
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This Sucks!

2009-01-27T13:49:00.001-05:00

Ex-Guantanamo inmates return to militancy in Yemen
By Caryle Murphy Caryle Murphy Tue Jan 27, 3:00 am ET

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia – Two Saudis formerly jailed at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have joined Al Qaeda's Yemeni branch, and authorities here worry that two other ex-Guantanamo inmates may have strayed back to militancy because they have recently disappeared from their homes.

The revelations illustrate the difficulties faced both by President Obama, who has pledged to shutter the facility for terror suspects, and the Saudi government, which is trying to reform its own radical jihadis, many of whom were imprisoned at Guantanamo before being released back to the kingdom.

The two Saudis working with Al Qaeda in Yemen, in addition to the two missing ex-Guantanamo detainees, participated in a Saudi rehabilitation program to counter violent ideology and reintegrate militants into society, says Gen. Mansour al-Turki, the Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman.

Further complicating Saudi efforts is a resurgence of Al Qaeda in Yemen that is drawing Saudis to fill its ranks, say terrorism experts. The group's upswing was underscored by its September attack on the US Embassy in Yemen that killed 16 people. The embassy was threatened Monday when a phone caller said it was the target of an imminent Al Qaeda attack, reported the Associated Press.

Last week, Al Qaeda in Yemen started to publish its magazine again and posted a video online declaring the Saudi and Yemeni Al Qaeda groups had united, according to Jihadica.com, a website that analyzes extremist activity on the Internet.

"The merger is probably not going to have any immediate consequences for Al Qaeda's capability," said Thomas Hegghammer, a scholar of Islamists and an international security fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "However, it does say something about intentions: It basically removes all doubt that Al Qaeda now intends to use Yemen as a launching pad for operations in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Gulf."

Can jihadis reform?
Yemen also has a rehab program for jihadis, but it has been much less aggressive and successful than its Saudi counterpart, which has been widely praised. This is another problem in closing Guantánamo because the largest group of remaining 245 inmates are Yemenis.

Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh said Saturday that his government had rejected a suggestion by the Bush administration to release the 94 Yemeni detainees into the Saudi rehabilitation program, wire services reported. He added that they all would be home within three months, and placed in Yemen's rehab effort.

A Pentagon spokesman said on Jan. 13 that of the 520 detainees released from the controversial military camp in Cuba, 18 had "returned to the fight" and another 43 are under suspicion of being involved in extremist activities. He declined to name them.

Mr. Turki, of the Saudi Interior Ministry, says the government's rehabilitation program remains a viable one despite the men's reversion to extremist activities.

"I cannot consider the program a failure if one or two who went through it did not comply" with its requirements, he says, noting that 117 Saudis released from Guantánamo had gone through the so-called Care Program.

An unknown number of Saudi extremists caught in – or attempting to go to – Iraq have also completed the program. About 3,200 other militants, nearly half of them still in Saudi prisons, have received religious and psychological counseling as part of the larger Saudi rehabilitation campaign.

Al Qaeda in Yemen
The two ex-Guantánamo inmates who surfaced in Yemen appeared in the video posted Friday. One, Said Ali al-Shihri, was described as a deputy leader of the new merged group. Turki says that Mr. Shihri, who spent six years in Guantánamo, was handed to Saudi authorities in late 2007 and stayed in the Care Program for five months. He was provisionally released in mid-May 2008 pending a court appearance.

As with most other Guantánamo returnees, the Saudis did not have evidence of criminal wrongdoing against Shihri. In such cases, Turki says, the men were charged with the minor violation of traveling to Afghanistan, a country Saudi passport holders are barred from visiting.

Muhammad al-Awfi, who also appeared in the video, returned from GuantÃ¡namo at the same time as Shihri, Turki said. He adds that the families of both men informed the authorities of their disappearances and "joined the search for them."

The Interior Ministry is "still investigating" the disappearance from their homes of two other Saudis released from Guantánamo whose whereabouts remain unknown, Turki says. He did not know their names or when the US military transferred them to Saudi authorities.

Last year, Turki disclosed that at least two graduates of the rehab program were rearrested for returning to extremist activities. He said on Sunday that they had not been at GuantÃ¡namo and were detained for "minor violations."

On Monday, Agence France-Presse reported that the Interior Ministry said in a statement that nine militants have been rearrested since the beginning of the program.

The defection of former Guantánamo inmate Shihri was first reported by The New York Times. The Friday video showed Shihri and Mr. Awfi, along with two Yemenis, touting the two groups' unification under the old name of "Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula."

One aim of the video, wrote Mr. Hegghammer, "was to humiliate Saudi authorities, who have let al-Shihri and al-Awfi, both former Guantánamo detainees (ISN# 372 and 333 respectively) and graduates of the famous rehabilitation program, slip away. Unless al-Shihri and al-Awfi are agents (which I doubt), their appearance is indeed extremely embarrassing for Saudi authorities."

The group's magazine, Sada al-Malahim, or "Echo of Glorious Battles," invited readers to submit questions to its e-mail address, a sign that the group "is not about to collapse anytime soon," Hegghammer noted.
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Vote with a Bullet

2009-01-21T16:59:00.002-05:00

So how long before obamamama takes a bullet for doing super reformist shit like this? I like it a lot, but he's gonna piss off too many corrupt and evil people and their gonna put a bullet in his brain, as sad as that is to say! You either die a hero or see yourself live long enough to get corrupted and become the villian!

Obama freezes salaries of some White House aides
By JENNIFER LOVEN, AP White House Correspondent Jennifer Loven, Ap White House Correspondent 44 mins ago

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's first public act in office Wednesday was to institute new limits on lobbyists in his White House and to freeze the salaries of high-paid aides, in a nod to the country's economic turmoil.

Announcing the moves while attending a ceremony in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to swear in his staff, Obama said the steps "represent a clean break from business as usual."

The pay freeze, first reported by The Associated Press, would hold salaries at their current levels for the roughly 100 White House employees who make over $100,000 a year. "Families are tightening their belts, and so should Washington," said the new president, taking office amid startlingly bad economic times that many fear will grow worse.

Those affected by the freeze include the high-profile jobs of White House chief of staff, national security adviser and press secretary. Other aides who work in relative anonymity also would fit into that cap if Obama follows a structure similar to the one George W. Bush set up.

Obama's new lobbying rules will not only ban aides from trying to influence the administration when they leave his staff. Those already hired will be banned from working on matters they have previously lobbied on, or to approach agencies that they once targeted.

The rules also ban lobbyists from giving gifts of any size to any member of his administration. It wasn't immediately clear whether the ban would include the traditional "previous relationships" clause, allowing gifts from friends or associates with which an employee comes in with strong ties.

The new rules also require that anyone who leaves his administration is not allowed to try to influence former friends and colleagues for at least two years. Obama is requiring all staff to attend to an ethics briefing like one he said he attended last week.

Obama called the rules tighter "than under any other administration in history." They followed pledges during his campaign to be strict about the influence of lobbyist in his White House.

"The new rules on lobbying alone, no matter how tough, are not enough to fix a broken system in Washington," he said. "That's why I'm also setting rules that govern not just lobbyists but all those who have been selected to serve in my administration."

In an attempt to deliver on pledges of a transparent government, Obama said he would change the way the federal government interprets the Freedom of Information Act. He said he was directing agencies that vet requests for information to err on the side of making information public — not to look for reasons to legally withhold it — an alteration to the traditional standard of evaluation.

Just because a government agency has the legal power to keep information private does not mean that it should, Obama said. Reporters and public-interest groups often make use of the law to explore how and why government decisions were made; they are often stymied as agencies claim legal exemptions to the law.

"For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in this city," Obama said.

He said the orders he was issuing Wednesday will not "make government as honest and transparent as it needs to be" nor go as far as he would like.

"But these historic measures do mark the beginning of a new era of openness in our country," Obama said. "And I will, I hope, do something to make government trustworthy in the eyes of the American people, in the days and weeks, months and years to come."

Wisdom from the Dhammapada

2008-11-14T13:36:00.002-05:00

Lots of good stuff here, but I think that this passage is a good candidate for a summation of what the perennial philosophy is all about!

Of what use are words of wisdom to the man who is unwise?
Of what use is a lamp to a man who is blind?

Hear the essence of thousands of sacred books:
to help others is virtue: to hurt others is sin

A man rises or goes down by his own actions:
like the builder of a wall, or as the digger of a well.

The narrow minded man thinks and says:
'This man is one of us; this one is not, he is a stranger.'
To the man of noble soul the whole of mankind is but one family.

I don't know about you, but this certainly inspires me!
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Bailout Price Tag: $3.5T So Far, But 'Real' Cost May Be Much Higher

2008-11-12T15:55:00.000-05:00

Posted Nov 12, 2008 10:16am EST by Aaron Task in Newsmakers, Recession, Banking
Related: AIG, FNM, FRE, XLF, ^DJI, ^GSPC, C

While the government is clearly spending a lot of taxpayers' money to bail out financial firms, the tally is even bigger than most Americans (economists and pundits included) are probably aware or willing to admit.

The bailout bonanza has gotten so big and happened so fast it's the true cost often gets lost in the discussion. Maybe Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke prefer it that way because the tally so far is nearly $3.5 trillion, and that's before a likely handout for the auto industry.

Yes, $3.45 trillion has already been spent, as Bailoutsleuth.com details:

* $2T Emergency Fed Loans (the ones the Fed won't discuss, as detailed here)
* $700B TARP (designed to buy bad debt, the fund is rapidly transforming as we'll discuss in an upcoming segment)
* $300B Hope Now (the government's year-old attempt at mortgage workouts)
* $200B Fannie/Freddie
* $140B Tax Breaks for Banks (WaPo has the details)
* $110B: AIG (with it's new deal this week, the big insurer got $40B of TARP money, plus $110B in other relief)

Tallying up the "true" cost of the bailout is difficult, and won't be known for months if not years. But considering $3.5 trillion is about 25% of the U.S. economy ($13.8 trillion in 2007) and the U.S. deficit may hit $1 trillion in fiscal 2009, hyperinflation and/or sharply higher interest rates seem likely outcomes down the road.

At the very least, the possibility of the U.S. losing its vaunted Aaa credit rating -- which determines the Treasury's borrowing costs -- cannot be discounted.

Moody's has already said it's not in jeopardy of being lowered. But we really can't put much stock in what Moody's -- or S&P or Fitch -- say after the subprime debacle, can we? More importantly, the price of credit default swaps on U.S. government debt has been on the rise since the bailout train got rolling, as Barron's reports.
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Fear of Free Sexuality

2008-11-12T01:30:00.002-05:00

this is from mysticism.nl and is really interesting and good stuff! check it out!
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Fears of Democrat crackdown lead to gun sales boom

2008-11-08T01:32:00.001-05:00

By DENA POTTER, Associated Press Writer Dena Potter, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 19 mins ago
MIDLOTHIAN, Va. – When 10-year-old Austin Smith heard Barack Obama had been elected president, he had one question: Does this mean I won't get a new gun for Christmas?

That brought his mother, the camouflage-clad Rachel Smith, to Bob Moates Sports Shop on Thursday, where she was picking out that special 20-gauge shotgun — one of at least five weapons she plans to buy before Obama takes office in January.

Like Smith, gun enthusiasts nationwide are stocking up on firearms out of fears that the combination of an Obama administration and a Democrat-dominated Congress will result in tough new gun laws.

"I think they're going to really try to crack down on guns and make it harder for people to try to purchase them," said Smith, 32, who taught all five of her children — ages 4 to 10 — to shoot because the family relies on game for food.

Last month, as an Obama win looked increasingly inevitable, there were more than 108,000 more background checks for gun purchases than in October 2007, a 15 percent increase. And they were up about 8 percent for the year as of Oct. 26, according to the FBI.

No data was available for gun purchases this week, but gun shops from suburban Virginia to the Rockies report record sales since Tuesday's election.

"They're scared to death of losing their rights," said David Hancock, manager of Bob Moates, where sales have nearly doubled in the past week and are up 15 percent for the year. On Election Day, salespeople were called in on their day off because of the crowd.

Obama has said he respects Americans' Second Amendment right to bear arms, but that he favors "common sense" gun laws. Gun rights advocates interpret that as meaning he'll at least enact curbs on ownership of assault and concealed weapons.

As a U.S. Senator, Obama voted to leave gun-makers and dealers open to lawsuits; and as an Illinois state legislator, he supported a ban on semiautomatic weapons and tighter restrictions on all firearms.

During an October appearance in Ohio, Obama sought to reassure gun owners. "I will not take your shotgun away," he said. "I will not take your rifle away. I won't take your handgun away."

Gun advocates take some solace in the current makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 this summer to strike down the District of Columbia's 32-year ban on handguns. For now, gun rights supporters hold a narrow edge on the court, but Obama could appoint justices who would swing it the other way.

Franklin Gun Shop outside Nashville, Tenn., sold more than 70 guns on Tuesday, making it the biggest sales day since the shop opened eight years ago. Guns & Gear in Cheyenne, Wyo., also set a one-day sales record on Tuesday, only to break that mark on Wednesday.

Stewart Wallin, owner of Get Some Guns in the Salt Lake City suburb of Murray, Utah, said he sold nine assault weapons the day after Obama was elected. That same day, the gun store Cheaper Than Dirt! in Fort Worth, Texas, sold $101,000 worth of merchandise, shattering its single-day sales record, store owner DeWayne Irwin said.

One Georgia gun shop advertised an "Obama sale" on an outdoor sign, but the owner took it down after people complained that the shop appeared to be issuing a call to violence against the country's first black leader.

The president of a Montana gun manufacturer stepped down last month after word that he supported Obama led to calls for a boycott of the company.

While Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, attributes some of the sales boom to the tanking economy, he thinks the Democratic sweep is the top reason why guns are suddenly a hot commodity.

"I don't think he'll be able to stand up to that anti-Second Amendment wing of the Democratic party that's just been spoiling for chance to ban America's guns," LaPierre said of Obama.

During the campaign, the NRA warned that Obama would be the "most antigun president in American history." And while Vice President-elect Joe Biden owns shotguns, he has supported a ban on assault weapons and has said private sellers at gun shows should be required to perform background checks.

But Mark Tushnet, a Harvard Law School professor who has written a book about the gun debate, said new firearms regulations will be a low priority for an Obama administration and Democratic Congress facing a global economic crisis and two wars.

"Maybe the gun-show loophole will be closed, but not much else," he said in an e-mail. "I'd be surprised, for example, if Congress enacted a new assault gun ban."

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said his organization will continue to press for what he calls "sensible" restrictions — background checks at gun shows, a ban on military-style assault weapons and cracking down on illegal gun trade. He believes he has the backing of the new administration on those issues, but any fears of a broader crackdown are unfounded.

"The one thing that they agree strongly with us on is that it's too easy for dangerous people to get guns in this country," Helmke said. "I guess if you're a dangerous person you might want to run out there and buy some more, but otherwise you should be OK."

___

Associated Press writers Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington, Angela K. Brown in Fort Worth, Texas, Kate Brumback in Marietta, Ga., Joe Edwards in Nashville, Tenn., Don Mitchell in Denver, Matt Joyce in Cheyenne, Wyo., and Paul Foy in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.

Wisdom from the Inspiration Lending Group at Kiva.org

2008-11-07T01:53:00.003-05:00

which i'm obviously a part of now, being it's proud 14 member. Happy and proud to be doing the work of Spirit for the Good of All Existence! Let's get to the good stuff

Steve said:

A liberation of sorts where the intensitiy of the reality before you shatters the "realities" you have just put behind you solely through acknowledgment.

and later

I saw an awakening of love and peace
The brotherhood of man increase
Saw the place we've all been waiting for
Lay hidden behind an open door
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Catholics, Muslims open landmark talks at Vatican

2008-11-04T13:42:00.001-05:00

By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor 1 hr 13 mins ago

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Senior Vatican and Islamic scholars launched their first Catholic-Muslim Forum on Tuesday to improve relations between the world's two largest faiths by discussing what unites and divides them.

The three-day meeting comes two years after Pope Benedict angered the Muslim world with a speech implying Islam was violent and irrational. In response, 138 Muslim scholars invited Christian churches to a new dialogue to foster mutual respect through a better understanding of each other's beliefs.

In their manifesto, "A Common Word," the Muslims argued that both faiths shared the core principles of love of God and neighbor. The talks focus on what this means for the religions and how it can foster harmony between them.

The meeting, including an audience with Pope Benedict, is the group's third conference with Christians after talks with United States Protestants in July and Anglicans last month.

Delegation leaders Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran and Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric opened the session with a moment of silence so delegations, each comprising 28 members and advisers, could say their own prayers for its success.

"It was a very cordial atmosphere," one delegate said.

Tauran, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, told the French Catholic daily La Croix on Monday that the Forum "represents a new chapter in a long history" of often strained relations.

He said discussing theology was difficult because of different understandings of God. The closed meeting started with a Catholic official spelling out the Christian teaching that humans can only approach God through Jesus Christ.

Muslim theologian Seyyed Hossein Nasr responded that such a view excluded non-Christians from salvation and suggested ways to see Islamic parallels to Christian views of God's love.

Delegates said the discussion that followed was friendly and respectful, not a clash of opinions. "We need to speak openly so we get to know each other," said one Muslim delegate.

NEW URGENCY

Christianity is the world's largest religion with 2 billion followers, just over half of them Catholic. Islam is next with 1.3 billion believers.

Saudi King Abdullah visits the United Nations next week to promote a parallel interfaith dialogue he launched last summer.

These and other meetings reflect a new urgency among Muslims since the September 11 attacks, the "clash of civilizations" theory and Pope Benedict's Regensburg speech showed a widening gap between the two faiths.

The Vatican was at first cool to the Common Word initiative, arguing that talks among theologians had little meaning if they did not lead to greater respect for religious liberty in Muslim countries, where some Christian minorities face oppression.

"We can only have a real dialogue if all believers have equal rights everywhere, which is not the case in some Muslim countries," said one Catholic delegate who requested anonymity.

The agenda reflects the different views. Tuesday's talks centered on theological issues proposed by the Muslims, Wednesday's meeting will focus on religious freedom issues the Vatican wants to raise.

The Vatican delegation includes bishops from minority Christian communities in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan. Among the Muslims are Sunnis and Shi'ites from around the world and converts from the United States, Canada and Britain.

There are three Catholic and two Muslim women participating.

The delegations will have an audience with Pope Benedict on Thursday and hold a public discussion that afternoon, the only session open to the media.

The Forum is due to meet every two years, alternately in Rome and in a Muslim country.

(Editing by Tim Pearce)
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An attempt at articulating the thesis of my Nietzsche book

2008-10-31T00:17:00.006-04:00

Hey Dr. Money,

so I got your email and I would be more than happy to answer any questions that she wants to know about my general grad school experience or about the WMU program in particular. Tell her to shoot me an email with some specific questions and I will do my best to answer them on a timely basis.

I am also writing because I had to share this insight with somebody and only you would understand what I'm talking about. I'm reading this book called Religious and Philosophical Aspects of the Laozi for my Taoism class here and I ran across these two lines in the text:

‘Rothberg argues that the spiritual path involves, in many traditions, ‘a process of progressive deconstruction of the structures of experience’ and later on Harold Roth writes that ‘Rothberg argues, “each path of deconstruction or deconditioning is itself constructed or conditioned in a certain way.’

I think that I see all, if not the majority, definitely a substantial portion, of Nietzsche's philosophy as a sustained attempt to do this. To destroy, with a philosophy hammer, all of those 'structures of experience,' like Christian theology and Western philosophy and 'Reason' in philosophy, that prevent or hinder or oppress people from going on their on individual spiritual journey. The idols that he is attempting to destroy with his philosophy hammer are all of those idols, like Christian dogma, Platonic philosphy, Kantian philosophy, an individual's very idea of God, that are preventing them starting on their spiritual journey. That is why God must be murdered, because God represents all of those things, religious and philosophical dogma's, that are preventing you from finding the truth about existence, the truth about God, inside of yourself. That is why all must resist Zarathustra and seek themselves before Zarathustra returns to them, because they had not yet sought themselves they are living a disingenous, false life by living by these dogma's instead of finding the truth inside of themselves. This is how a statue can slay you. The plucking at zarathustra’s wreath is the desire on the part of the seeker to go on one’s own spiritual journey, the murdering of God, or your image or idea or dogma about God, is the first step on your spiritual journey, where you will find the God inside of you, or the Universal Self that is common to all mystic traditions. Nietzsche may or may not believe this last part here, but I do see in his writings this kind of mystical methodology in his comments about religion and free spirits. Once a person's God is murdered, then they are off on their own spiritual journey and truly for this once oppressed but now truly free spirits, there has never ever in the history of civilization been so many open sea's to find yourselves on.

I think that this is what I think about some of Nietzschean philosophy and would like to write a book to explore this idea to see if there is any validity to it or to see of other of Nietzsche's ideas would be in contradiction to it. I need to get this idea out of my head!

Thanks for your reply, hope to talk to you soon

Dr. Money's response:

I AGREE! With the one caveat that I believe Nietzsche is a naturalist
through and through...hence, if you want to continue employing
"religious" or "spiritual" in a naturalistic worldview, you would need
to make it clear that THAT is the context. After all, the words continue
to seep with meanings and connotations that have been attached to it
under very different conditions. I might employ the concept "witch," but
I do not mean to suggest women with supernatural powers, flying on
broomsticks, etc. Perhaps to avoid confusion, I should give up that
concept and use or invent another? Or if there are some connections that
I want to continue using, perhaps I use the older concept and try to
shift its meaning. This, itself, is destructive-constructive
interaction! And it is a more general philosophical issue on
individuation of concepts, meaning, etc. But I think it is related to
what you say.

Perhaps the deification of man that N is often charged with simply
amounts to the elimination (destruction) of community as the guide for
"spiritual journey" and the assertion and elevation of the individual?

Perhaps the connection between spiritual pre-N and spiritual post-N
(naturalistically construed) is the element of meaning or value. In the
end, I think N is an ethical philosopher, thinking about how to
understand ethics (broadly construed) in a new (and I would submit
"truer") worldview--naturalism.
.

I should write a paper about this

2008-10-28T01:14:00.001-04:00

Total artificial heart to be ready by 2011: research team

Mon Oct 27, 11:54 am ET

PARIS (AFP) – A fully implantable artificial heart designed to overcome the worldwide shortage of transplant donors will be ready for clinical trial by 2011, the French professor behind the prototype said Monday.

Leading heart transplant specialist Alain Carpentier, head of the European research team behind the project, said the prosthetic heart was ready to be manufactured and should be ready for human use "within two and half years".

Biomedical firm Carmat, a start-up funded by the European space and defence group EADS, France's state innovation agency, venture capital firm Truffle and Carpentier himself, is to produce the heart at a site near Paris.

"We are moving from pure research to clinical applications. After 15 years of work, we are handing over to industry to produce an artificial heart usable by man," Carpentier told AFP.

Several teams around the world are racing to develop a total artificial organ able to permanently replace the human heart, in answer to a worldwide shortage of heart donors estimated at 20,000 each year.

Carpentier developed his prototype in association with a team of aerospace engineers seconded to the project by EADS.

Shaped like a real heart, with the same blood flow rythms, the prototype uses the same technology as prosthetic heart valves developed by Carpentier and already used around the world.

Made from chemically treated animal tissues, these "biomaterials" are designed to avoid rejection by the patient's immune system or blood clotting, a recurrent problem with existing artificial hearts, Carpentier said.

It is aimed at patients suffering after a massive heart attack or with late-stage heart failure, for whom drug therapy, ventricular assistance or heart transplant have failed or are not available.

Up until now, the heart has been tested via digital simulation as well as on animals, with trials revealing "no complications", Carpentier said.

Today's generation of artificial heart is a thumb-sized device implanted in the chest that sucks blood from the heart and pumps it into the aorta, and which has to be recharged every four hours using an external battery.

Surgeons in the United States and Europe have implanted such ventricular assistance devices (VAD) in 220 patients since 2000.

A further type of artificial heart works as a "bridge" until a suitable donor organ can be found.

Rival prototypes for a fully implantable artificial heart include the AbioCor -- developed by US firm Abiomed -- which was used in 14 trials between 2001 and 2004, with patients surviving an average of 5.3 months.

Another US team is working on a prototype called MagScrew Total Artificial Heart, which was trialled on calves in 2005, while researchers in Japan and South Korea are working on similar projects.

October 2nd 2008 Letter to Dr. Money

2008-10-02T22:51:00.000-04:00

Hello Dr. Money,

I know your busy, but I just wanted to give you a quick update of where I am right now. Firstly, I want to thank you again for the recent letter you wrote for me. Thanks in part to your letter, I was awarded a graduate assistantship in the master's program in comparative religion here at western michigan university and am currently one month into this new program, working on my second master's degree. I finished up my master of arts degree in philosophy, with an emphasis in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, this past august and got my degree in the mail a few weeks ago. I also had the opportunity to meet Peter van Inwagen, who attended my metaphysics class, and both Dean Zimmerman and Alvin Plantinga, this past spring semester when they were giving talks at calvin college. i also read an awesome book called the problem of existence by arthur witherall in my metaphysics class as well, that i highly recomend if you want to do a class on the fundamental queston of metaphysics, why is there something rather than nothing.

i took an independent study on the shinto religion this summer and am currently taking a class on Daoism and a philosophy class on aesthetics this semester, since i was never able to take the one that dr. jacob's teaches at millikin and have no knowledge of aesthetics other than what i am learning this semster. i also need to decide if i'm going to learn latin or greek as well pretty soon, as this comparative religion program has a language requirement. any suggestions here perhaps?

other than that, life is good for me right now, i'm enjoying this new program while taking some classes from the old one, i think i met the girl i'm going to marry this summer who lives a few minutes away from my dad, i have lots of school loan debt, and i still think about doing some sort of thesis on nietzsche even to this day. i've found some books that i definitely want to read in regard to this and thought i would share them with you, as they all look very very interesting. they are listed below

Nietzsche's Philosophy of Religion: Julian Young

The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism by Bernard Reginster

Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion by Tyler T. Roberts

i think that nietzsche, in his writings, was working with a distinction that i think has only been around this past century, a distinction between what is spiritual vs what is religious. i think that he endorses lots' of what is spiritual (a book for free spirits, etc., etc.) but degrades lots, if not all, of what is religious. i think a lot of people regard his criticizing the latter as also necessarily criticizing the former, but i don't think that is necessarily the case. i know that i mentioned mysticism before in this regard, but i think more narrowly now, after reading your past email about this over and over again, it's a kind of naturalistic or humanistic or even atheistic 'alchemy' that he is espousing in some passages. i think it's this tension, between a kind of naturalistic or even atheistic 'spirituality' if you will and his extremely negative views about religion that i want to explore further in some large work and that i think get conflated when thinking about nietzsche's views on religion. obviously, lots of further study is needed to further clarify exactly what i think about this issue. hopefully, i can do this as a master's thesis here and finally get this idea out of my head!

i've already exceeded the length i wanted to keep this at, so i'll end it here. but thanks again for everything you have done for me once again Bob. if you have some time, let me know how the little ones are doing, how millikin is doing, and any comments about any philosophy stuff would also greatly be appreciated as well. hope to talk to you soon
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Poll: Racial views steer some white Dems away from Obama

2008-09-22T01:31:00.004-04:00

by RON FOURNIER and TREVOR TOMPSON, Associated Press Writers

WASHINGTON (AP) — Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them "lazy," "violent," responsible for their own troubles.

The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about two and one-half percentage points.

Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He's an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation's oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.

More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can't win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and they are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don't have such views.

Such numbers are a harsh dose of reality in a campaign for the history books. Obama, the first black candidate with a serious shot at the presidency, accepted the Democratic nomination on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, a seminal moment for a nation that enshrined slavery in its Constitution.

"There are a lot fewer bigots than there were 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean there's only a few bigots," said Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman who helped analyze the exhaustive survey.

The pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush's unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does that fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.

The findings suggest that Obama's problem is close to home — among his fellow Democrats, particularly non-Hispanic white voters. Just seven in 10 people who call themselves Democrats support Obama, compared to the 85 percent of self-identified Republicans who back McCain.

The survey also focused on the racial attitudes of independent voters because they are likely to decide the election.

Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren't voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn't vote for any Democrat for president — white, black or brown.

Not all whites are prejudiced. Indeed, more whites say good things about blacks than say bad things, the poll shows. And many whites who see blacks in a negative light are still willing or even eager to vote for Obama.

On the other side of the racial question, the Illinois Democrat is drawing almost unanimous support from blacks, the poll shows, though that probably wouldn't be enough to counter the negative effect of some whites' views.

Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.

Three in 10 of those Democrats who don't trust Obama's change-making credentials say they plan to vote for McCain.

Still, the effects of whites' racial views are apparent in the polling.

Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.

But in an election without precedent, it's hard to know if such models take into account all the possible factors at play.

The AP-Yahoo News poll used the unique methodology of Knowledge Networks, a Menlo Park, Calif., firm that interviews people online after randomly selecting and screening them over telephone. Numerous studies have shown that people are more likely to report embarrassing behavior and unpopular opinions when answering questions on a computer rather than talking to a stranger.

Other techniques used in the poll included recording people's responses to black or white faces flashed on a computer screen, asking participants to rate how well certain adjectives apply to blacks, measuring whether people believe blacks' troubles are their own fault, and simply asking people how much they like or dislike blacks.

"We still don't like black people," said John Clouse, 57, reflecting the sentiments of his pals gathered at a coffee shop in Somerset, Ohio.

Given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said the word "violent" strongly applied. Among other words, 22 percent agreed with "boastful," 29 percent "complaining," 13 percent "lazy" and 11 percent "irresponsible." When asked about positive adjectives, whites were more likely to stay on the fence than give a strongly positive assessment.

Among white Democrats, one third cited a negative adjective and, of those, 58 percent said they planned to back Obama.

The poll sought to measure latent prejudices among whites by asking about factors contributing to the state of black America. One finding: More than a quarter of white Democrats agree that "if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites."

Those who agreed with that statement were much less likely to back Obama than those who didn't.

Among white independents, racial stereotyping is not uncommon. For example, while about 20 percent of independent voters called blacks "intelligent" or "smart," more than one third latched on the adjective "complaining" and 24 percent said blacks were "violent."

Nearly four in 10 white independents agreed that blacks would be better off if they "try harder."

The survey broke ground by incorporating images of black and white faces to measure implicit racial attitudes, or prejudices that are so deeply rooted that people may not realize they have them. That test suggested the incidence of racial prejudice is even higher, with more than half of whites revealing more negative feelings toward blacks than whites.

Researchers used mathematical modeling to sort out the relative impact of a huge swath of variables that might have an impact on people's votes — including race, ideology, party identification, the hunger for change and the sentiments of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's backers.

Just 59 percent of her white Democratic supporters said they wanted Obama to be president. Nearly 17 percent of Clinton's white backers plan to vote for McCain.

Among white Democrats, Clinton supporters were nearly twice as likely as Obama backers to say at least one negative adjective described blacks well, a finding that suggests many of her supporters in the primaries — particularly whites with high school education or less — were motivated in part by racial attitudes.

The survey of 2,227 adults was conducted Aug. 27 to Sept. 5. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.1 percentage points.

Associated Press writers Nancy Benac, Julie Carr Smyth, Philip Elliot, Julie Pace and Sonya Ross contributed to this story.

Bassford replied:

That is a ridiculous comment. Why not talk about blacks who are only voting for the black guy. I don't really watch late night tv but there was a Leno where they were asking people on the street (in large part minorities) who they were going to vote for and 80% of them said I'm voting for the black guy not for Obama.

There is definitely a dichotomy between whites and blacks. But what cracks me up is that the talk only seems to be about the one side of racism or the dichotomy. In my opinion, the black men in our generation have done more to create this dichotomy than white people. You cannot expect white people to ignore race when blacks certainly do not.

For example, there is no such thing as WET allowed but BET is ok. When you create a difference between certain words black people can say that white people can't. That there is an urban language that when a white person talks that way he is considered as trying to be black. But when a black man runs for president white political analysts describe him his articulate, they are chastized as being racist bc they must assume black people are not articulate.

By no means am I saying that whites aren't racist and that there is not a long way to go to correct a lot of injustices. But as a white guy who lives on a street in Bmore that is 99% black (meaning i'm the 1%), racism goes both ways. I use to be a person who used the term reverse racism. There is no such thing. There is only racism.

My thoughts! I'm on the road and tired so I hope this makes sense.

Marie replied:

Sighhhhhhhhhhh... Jason, I don't think it's as bad as this article makes it out to be.

The article states things like "40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks" and some percentage "agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks." Who wouldn't? You could ask the same question of white people about white people and get the same results. Or black of black. Or black of white. Or black of Arab or Jew of white and so on. Is anyone totally positive of anything? I would think not. Then doesn't that mean everyone is partly negative towards everything?

I then like how the article goes on to say that "Not all whites are prejudiced." Geez, thanks! "Indeed, more whites say good things about blacks than say bad things, the poll shows. And many whites who see blacks in a negative light are still willing or even eager to vote for Obama." Right like the fact that Obama won IOWA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You can't get much whiter than those corn huskers.

What about the fact that a lot of blacks are only voting for Obama because he's black? I'd venture to say the percentage is higher for black people voting for him due to his race than white people not voting for him due to his race. The article even stated "On the other side of the racial question, the Illinois Democrat is drawing almost unanimous support from blacks." Of course there are the skinhead types out there that would never vote for him. But I don't think that is your everday run of the mill 'corn husker', if you will.

Paul replied:

I could not agree more. It's all in how you spin it. Yes, there are
people who would never vote for him no matter what, because he's
black. And there are people who would never vote for him because he's
a democrat, too liberal etc. None of it matters. People are allowed
their opinions, even if they're wrong. And some poeple might change
their opinions, you never know.

Also, that there are republican conservatives that would vote for
Obama is very weird for me. Either they aren't really conservatives
or they value skin color over everything else. Which makes them
racists. Which, if you think about it, is a pretty conservative
republican view.

I replied:

i guess i just bemoan the fact that there are still people in this world who 'value skin color over everything else.' when will we live in a world where people are not judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, regardless of race, religion, sexual preference, etc. etc.

Bassford replied:

I defninitely agree that there are still some injustices but I don't think this country will get past racism until both sides work on the issue. That just won't happen when Blacks see racism as only being a white problem. You can't have a dichotomy where its ok for blacks to use the word nigger and its ok for them to use the word bitch but its not ok for whites. I see the hatred in the black of youth towards white people. They have never suffered any direct racism or hatred from white people but still have this hatred of whites bc of stories of the past. They don't realize that they live in a country now where a black man has a real legitimate chance of becoming president for the first time. Until they see that themselves and realize as Obama himself said, America has changed and grown then racism will not be fixed.

I replied:

I agree with pretty much everything you have said in this email and am glad you brought up the point that working on racism and racism itself is a two way street and that as people, we will not get past this until 'both sides work on the issue.' However, I do disagree with one thing you said, namely that blacks 'have never suffered any direct racism or hatred from white people.' I disagree with this statement and question your epistemic access to this fact, although my epistemic access is probably similarly limited. However, I have talked with black people, one person in particular, and they have expressed to me that indeed, they have suffered and been exposed to direct racism from white people. They have not based their views on stories from the past, although a lot of black people do do that, but have experienced it themselves firsthand even in this modern day.

I guess that this is the only counterpoint that I want to make to your point. Indeed, everything you said in the email I believe is true and agree with, but I think it is naive to think that this direct kind of racism doesn't happen today (on both sides of the divide) and that all the current racism is simply based on our shared past history. Direct racism is still very much alive in the modern day, although I'm sure that it is declining a little bit more everyday. We should ask D this question, if he has ever experienced any sort of direct racism. I really think that he would say yes, he has experienced it.

USA Socialism

2008-09-20T02:19:00.000-04:00

so what do all you neo-cons think of all this government bailout of wall st and shit that's been happening these past few days? isn't this totally what you guys stand up against and why you'll be voting for mccain and not obama this coming november, because the former will be more laissaz faire and not impose his socialistic government on private business the way obama hussein wants to with universal healthcare? i'm just surprised that nobodies said anything regarding this stuff these past few days.

so it's ok for the government to bail out big business and shady businessmen and speculators on wall st who make shitty loans and investments, but not ok for them to help out the single working mother of 3 in the robert taylor homes who can't pay her electric bill because gas prices are too high and she has to put food on the table? welfare is allright for the former but not for the latter? why, because one wears a tie and a white shirt and shops at armani, but the other wears a pink shirt and black shoes and shops at goodwill and the salvation army?

and how do you feel about your boy, Dubya, and his oh so strict fiscal and governmental conservatism, what is supposed to be a hallmark and selling point for the repulican party in the first place? when you add up these wall st bailouts, his blue light special wars in the herion mountains and the oil reserve desert, along with his creation of whole new sections of government (department of homeland defense), isn't he just the paradigmatic example of what a good republican and fiscal and small government conservative should be? if husseinmessaih did half as much spending and creation of government that Dubya has done, you guys would be calling him a commie bastard and saying his granddad was freidrich engels evil socialist brother.

i guess i just want to see a little more consistency out of you when it comes to your positions. if your against government spending and are for small government, be against it regardless of whether a republican or democrat is endorsing it. if you are pro life, then be pro life across the board, stand up for both the unborn fetus and the death row inmate and the civilian casualities of war and those innocent men who were tortured and killed in guantanamo bay and for our own soldiers who died in these wars. this position would be the true pro life position.

but basically i dont' understand what is exactly happening on wall st right now and it would be nice if somebody helped it explain it to me, because this is yet another bill that our children and grandchildren will be paying for long after we are wormfood.
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What makes a radical?

2008-08-21T12:13:00.000-04:00

When asked why they supported the 9/11 attacks, the radicals gave
political rather than religious reasons.

from the May 16, 2008 edition

Various studies of Muslim terrorists show that most are not graduates
of madrassahs but of private or public schools and universities; most
are from middle- and working-class backgrounds; some are devout and
others are not. This survey confirms these findings:

•Among the Muslims surveyed, 7 percent condoned the 9/11 attacks. The
study terms these the "politically radicalized."

•When asked why they supported the attacks, the radicals gave
political rather than religious reasons. They have a sense of
political frustration and feel humiliated and threatened by the West.
Those who opposed the attacks often gave religious reasons for doing
so.

•The radicals, on average, are not the down-and-out people in society.
They are more educated than moderates, and two-thirds of radicals have
average or above-average income. Forty-seven percent supervise others
at work. They are more optimistic about their own lives than are
moderates (52 percent to 45 percent).

•Radicals are no more religious than the general population and do not
attend mosque more frequently.

•What distinguishes them is not their perception of Western culture or
freedoms, but their perception of US policies. Even radicals say they
support democracy. But 63 percent of radicals do not believe that the
United States will allow people in the region to fashion their own
political future without direct US influence
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This Really Pisses Me Off as Well!

2008-08-07T22:55:00.007-04:00

You Still Can't Write About Muhammad
By ASRA Q. NOMANIAugust 6, 2008; Page A15

in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha's life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,000, two-book deal, she was ecstatic. This past spring, she began plans for an eight-city book tour after the Aug. 12 publication date of "The Jewel of Medina" -- a tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet's harem.
It's not going to happen: In May, Random House abruptly called off publication of the book. The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world.
Random House feared the book would become a new "Satanic Verses," the Salman Rushdie novel of 1988 that led to death threats, riots and the murder of the book's Japanese translator, among other horrors. In an interview about Ms. Jones's novel, Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at Random House Publishing Group, said that it "disturbs us that we feel we cannot publish it right now." He said that after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received "from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment."
After consulting security experts and Islam scholars, Mr. Perry said the company decided "to postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel."
This saga upsets me as a Muslim -- and as a writer who believes that fiction can bring Islamic history to life in a uniquely captivating and humanizing way. "I'm devastated," Ms. Jones told me after the book got spiked, adding, "I wanted to honor Aisha and all the wives of Muhammad by giving voice to them, remarkable women whose crucial roles in the shaping of Islam have so often been ignored -- silenced -- by historians." Last month, Ms. Jones signed a termination agreement with Random House, so her literary agent could shop the book to other publishers.
This time, the instigator of the trouble wasn't a radical Muslim cleric, but an American academic. In April, looking for endorsements, Random House sent galleys to writers and scholars, including Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas in Austin. Ms. Jones put her on the list because she read Ms. Spellberg's book, "Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of 'A'isha Bint Abi Bakr."
But Ms. Spellberg wasn't a fan of Ms. Jones's book. On April 30, Shahed Amanullah, a guest lecturer in Ms. Spellberg's classes and the editor of a popular Muslim Web site, got a frantic call from her. "She was upset," Mr. Amanullah recalls. He says Ms. Spellberg told him the novel "made fun of Muslims and their history," and asked him to warn Muslims.
In an interview, Ms. Spellberg told me the novel is a "very ugly, stupid piece of work." The novel, for example, includes a scene on the night when Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha: "the pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion's sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life." Says Ms. Spellberg: "I walked through a metal detector to see 'Last Temptation of Christ,'" the controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. "I don't have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can't play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography."
After he got the call from Ms. Spellberg, Mr. Amanullah dashed off an email to a listserv of Middle East and Islamic studies graduate students, acknowledging he didn't "know anything about it [the book]," but telling them, "Just got a frantic call from a professor who got an advance copy of the forthcoming novel, 'Jewel of Medina' -- she said she found it incredibly offensive." He added a write-up about the book from the Publishers Marketplace, an industry publication.
The next day, a blogger known as Shahid Pradhan posted Mr. Amanullah's email on a Web site for Shiite Muslims -- "Hussaini Youth" -- under a headline, "upcoming book, 'Jewel of Medina': A new attempt to slander the Prophet of Islam." Two hours and 28 minutes after that, another person by the name of Ali Hemani proposed a seven-point strategy to ensure "the writer withdraws this book from the stores and apologise all the muslims across the world."
Meanwhile back in New York City, Jane Garrett, an editor at Random House's Knopf imprint, dispatched an email on May 1 to Knopf executives, telling them she got a phone call the evening before from Ms. Spellberg (who happens to be under contract with Knopf to write "Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an.")
"She thinks there is a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence," Ms. Garrett wrote. "Denise says it is 'a declaration of war . . . explosive stuff . . . a national security issue.' Thinks it will be far more controversial than the satanic verses and the Danish cartoons. Does not know if the author and Ballantine folks are clueless or calculating, but thinks the book should be withdrawn ASAP." ("The Jewel of Medina" was to be published by Random House's Ballantine Books.) That day, the email spread like wildfire through Random House, which also received a letter from Ms. Spellberg and her attorney, saying she would sue the publisher if her name was associated with the novel. On May 2, a Ballantine editor told Ms. Jones's agent the company decided to possibly postpone publication of the book.
On a May 21 conference call, Random House executive Elizabeth McGuire told the author and her agent that the publishing house had decided to indefinitely postpone publication of the novel for "fear of a possible terrorist threat from extremist Muslims" and concern for "the safety and security of the Random House building and employees."
All this saddens me. Literature moves civilizations forward, and Islam is no exception. There is in fact a tradition of historical fiction in Islam, including such works as "The Adventures of Amir Hamza," an epic on the life of Muhammad's uncle. Last year a 948-page English translation was published, ironically, by Random House. And, for all those who believe the life of the prophet Muhammad can't include stories of lust, anger and doubt, we need only read the Quran (18:110) where, it's said, God instructed Muhammad to tell others: "I am only a mortal like you."
Ms. Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is the author of "Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam" (HarperOne, 2006)

I replied:

how long are we gonna let extremists and radicals dictate what we say and do? to bow down to them, to not publish stuff that they find offense, is to let them win, to let them have so much control over our lives that we can't even say or think what is really on our minds. if we start to cower like this then the war on terror is already lost and the terrorists have won, if they force us to take away our freedom of speech. we must be willing to stand up for what we believe in, despite the threat of death. this is just really sad to me and i believe, is more of a victory for the extremists than any bombs they can ever drop.

sara replied:

i agree with maynard, in a way. i agree in principal, i agree in the abstract, and i agree when we are thinking about thinkgs from far away. However, if i worked at the company, and was worried about my OWN life because of this, i can;t say i would move forward with the publishing. i can say that we should be ABLE to publish a book without worrying about it, but since they ARE worried about it i can;t say that any person should do something where they feel they might be killed because of it jut because i think a boiok should be published. so this is sad, and they should be able to publish the book, but i can;t say they should publish it.

marie replied:

How can this woman say that The Last Temptation of Christ isn't the same thing as this book? 4. That's the difference I've been saying about Christians and Muslims. I'm sure that there was outrage by Christians when The Last Temptation of Christ came out, but it wasn't not released because people were gonna die because of it.

sara replied:

in regards to number 4 i dont think its the difference between muslims and christians, i think it is partially a difference in perception. there were death threats over the last temptation of christ, but people didnt take them as seriously as they take threats from muslims. not all muslims who deliver death threats will or would follow through on them same as christians. but right now, we are in a world where muslims have killed people, so we see all muslims as killing people. but if a christian dedlviered a death threat over something i was doing i would take it JUST as seriously as if a muslim did. because in both religions you dont know who the crazies are.

marie replied:

But isn't everything perception? (Thanks Jason.) No one would be scared if it wasn't something perceived to be scary in the first place, right? You weren't scared cause you knew that there wasn't anything to be afraid of. Which again, is my point. People are scared because there is something to be afraid of. And no one is saying that ALL Muslims are going to blow up people. But there seems to be a big understanding that the ones that would, will.

sara replied:

if you threaten to kill me no im not scared. if i get a letter in the mail saying im a christian i am going to kill you you godless heathen i would be terrified. ebcause there are christians who are crazies. and i think you ignore that a lot.

I replied:

i think we should just say this and acknowledge it and not try to make excuses anymore. the fact is that muslim extremists are more extreme in their extremism than christian extremists and the fact is that there are more of these muslim extremists than christian extremists. but i think the thing we fail to recognize is that this extremism, and especially the number of extremists, have nothing to do with the particulars of the religion. if i want to be an extremist and kill people to prove a political point, i can use anything from sacred scriptures to beatles songs to hollywood movies to a picture of christ on a piece of toast to cartoons of muhammad to justify my extremism. i'm gonna be extreme regardless because it's not the justification which is motivating the extremism, but the politics and socio-economic conditions behind my extremism which is it's true motivation.

thus, i think it all has to do with politics and the socio-economic status of the world in which these extremists live. there aren't as many christian extremists because christians weren't forced off their land with american weapons in 1948, and there are more muslim extremists in the middle east than there are christian extremists in america because, simply put, there are a lot more jobs and economic opportunities here in the usa than in the middle east and we are not as repressed over here as much as they are over there. i think that these factors contribute a lot more to extremism than people realize and explain why there are more muslim extremists than christian extremists.

sara replied:

and i agree with Jason about this. but i do not agree when people try and say that there are no christians who are like that. thats the part i disagree with.

david replied:

Its all relative, right. Christians making death threats in northern Ireland are perceived real. I bet death threats by Christians in medieval times were looked at with a second glance as well.

I replied:

i think that's a great point david, it all depends on the times and places we are living in. Rome sure took the death threats of Jewish extremists in the first century as real because they remembered the Maccabean revolt a few decades earlier. they took the threats as real so much so that they destroyed israel and the temple in 70 AD because of it. and if we lived in ireland, we would be much more scared of christian death threats than muslim death threats, because christians have bombed people there and muslims haven't. it's vice versa though for us here in the states because of 9/11. people in india take threats from hindu's and muslims as real because they've been bombing each other for a few years now. and people in japan take threats from those crazy buddhist sects as real because they killed people with that poison gas attack a few years ago. and of course, the one thing that links all of these attacks together is not necessarily religion, but politics. i think that all terrorism is political terrorism, regardless of what label we attach to it or what ideology these terrorists say they represent.

David replied:

Admittedly, it was probably the way I was saying this years ago. But ya’ll seemed pretty intent that I was representing a shallow mindset regarding this topic. Even Maher tended to agree that radical Islamic fanaticism was more dangerous then its Christian counterpart. Just an observation. Now it seems most are recognizing the extreme factions within the Muslims is more dangerous then the radical Christians. Because everytime I would bitch about Islamic extremism ya’ll would bring up Ralph reed or falwell or the abortion bombers.
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Threatening to Move to Canada

2008-08-06T01:10:00.000-04:00

Often times, white people get frustrated with the state of their country. They do not like the President, or Congress, or the health care system, or the illegal status of Marijuana. Whenever they are presented with a situation that seems unreasonable to them, their first instinct is to threaten to move to Canada.

For example, if you are watching TV with white people and there is a piece on the news about that they do not agree with, they are likely to declare “ok, that’s it, I’m moving to Canada.”

Though they will never actually move to Canada, the act of declaring that they are willing to undertake the journey is very symbolic in white culture. It shows that their dedication to their lifestyle and beliefs are so strong, that they would consider packing up their entire lives and moving to a country that is only slightly different to the one they live in now.

Within white culture, it is agreed upon that if Canada had better weather it would be a perfect place.

Being aware that this information can be used quite easily to gain the trust of white people. Whenever they say, “I’m moving to Canada,” you must immediately respond with “I have relatives in Canada.”

They will then expect you to tell them about how Canada has a perfect healthcare system, legalized everything, and no crime. Though not true, it will reassure them that they are making the right choice by saying they want to move there.

But be warned, they will reference you in future conversations and possibly call on you to settle disputes about Canadian tax rates. So use this advice only if you plan to do some basic research.

Note: Canadian white people threaten to move to Europe.

Note: Europeans are unable to threaten to move anywhere.

100th Blog Post! (Well, Almost)

2008-08-05T01:58:00.003-04:00

So I blogged my 100th blogpost, 2 blog posts before this one. I wanted to devote an entire blogpost to my 100th post, but Aquinas took precedence over celebrating my 100th post, so I decided to do it later. Then I blogged yesterday about Solzhenitsyn dying and thus, finally remembered to blog about my 100th blogpost tonight when i got home from Juli's house, who is my new girlfriend who I started talking to on July 23 and whom i'm eventually going to marry one day. so this blogpost is dedicated to my 100th blogpost and my future wife, Juli. I love you both very much!
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Solzhenitsyn, chronicler of Soviet gulag, dies

2008-08-04T00:02:00.000-04:00

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday at his home near Moscow, but declined further comment.

Through unflinching accounts of the years he spent in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn's novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Solzhenitsyn (sohl-zheh-NEETS'-ihn) devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His non-fiction "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.

But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn's refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.

After a triumphant return from exile in the U.S. in 1994 that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn't read his books.

During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources cheaply following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view.

But under Vladimir Putin's 2000-2008 presidency, Solzhenitsyn's vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence.

Putin argued, as Solzhenitsyn did in a speech at Harvard University in 1978, that Russia has a separate civilization from the West, one that can't be reconciled either to Communism or western-style liberal democracy, but requires a system adapted to its history and traditions.

Putin's successor Dmitry Medvedev sent condolences after news of Solzhenitsyn's death, Russian media reported.

"Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking," Solzhenitsyn said in the Harvard speech. "For one thousand years, Russia has belonged to such a category."

Born Dec. 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Solzhenitsyn served as a front-line artillery captain in World War II. In the closing weeks of the war, he was arrested for writing what he called "certain disrespectful remarks" about Stalin in a letter to a friend, referring to him as "the man with the mustache."

He was sentenced to eight years in labor camps -- three of which he served in a camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan that was the basis for his first novel. After that, he served three years of exile in Kazakhstan.

That's where he began to write, memorizing much of his work so it wouldn't be lost if it were seized. His theme was the suffering and injustice of life in Stalin's gulag — a Soviet abbreviation for the slave labor camp system, which Solzhenitsyn made part of the lexicon.

He continued writing while working as a mathematics teacher in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan.

The first fruit of this labor was "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.

The book was published in 1962 by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all. Abroad, the book — which went through numerous revisions — was lauded not only for its bravery, but for its spare, unpretentious language.

After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn began facing KGB harassment, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred.

"A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country," he wrote in "The First Circle," his next novel, a book about inmates in one of Stalin's "special camps" for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential.

Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps in 1946, soon after his arrest.

The novel "Cancer Ward", which appeared in 1967, was another fictional worked based on Solzhenitsyn's life. In this case, the subject was his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin's death, until June 1956.

In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. "A man sprouts a tumor and dies -- how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?"

He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin's reign.

"Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs — and they believed it? ... Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades — and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people — and they believed it?"

The Stalinist era, he wrote, quoting from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, forced Soviet citizens to choose one of three roles: tyrant, traitor, prisoner.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, an unusual move for the Swedish Academy, which generally makes awards late in an author's life after decades of work. The academy cited "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."

Soviet authorities barred the author from traveling to Stockholm to receive the award and official attacks were intensified in 1973 when the first book in the "Gulag" trilogy appeared in Paris.

"During all the years until 1961," Solzhenitsyn wrote in an autobiography written for the Nobel Foundation, "not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known."

The following year, he was arrested on a treason charge and expelled the next day to West Germany in handcuffs. His expulsion inspired worldwide condemnation of the regime of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Solzhenitsyn then made his homeland in America, settling in 1976 in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont, with his wife and sons.

Living at a secluded hillside compound he rarely left, he called his 18 years there the most productive of his life. There he worked on what he considered to be his life's work, a multivolume saga of Russian history titled "The Red Wheel."

Although free from repression, Solzhenitsyn longed for his native land. Neither was he enchanted by Western democracy, with its emphasis on individual freedom.

To the dismay of his supporters, in his Harvard speech he rejected the West's faith "Western pluralistic democracy" as the model for all other nations. It was a mistake, he warned, for Western societies to regard the failure of the rest of the world to adopt the democratic model as a product of "wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension."

Some critics saw "The Red Wheel" books as tedious and hectoring, rather than as sweeping and lit by moral fire.

"Exile from his great theme, Stalinism and the gulag, had exposed his major weaknesses," D.M. Thomas wrote in a 1998 biography, theorizing that the intensity of the earlier works was "a projection of his own repressed violence."

Then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1990 and the treason charge was finally dropped in 1991, less than a month after a failed Soviet coup.

Following an emotional homecoming that started in the Russian Far East on May 27, 1994, and became a whistle-stop tour across the country, Solzhenitsyn settled in a tree-shaded, red brick home overlooking the Moscow River just west of the capital.

While avoiding a partisan political role, Solzhenitsyn vowed to speak "the whole truth about Russia, until they shut my mouth like before."

He was contemptuous of President Boris Yeltsin, blaming Yeltsin for the collapse of Russia's economy, his dependence on bailouts by the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, his tolerance of the rising influence of a handful of Russian billionaires — who were nicknamed "oligarchs" by an American diplomat.

Yeltsin's reign, Solzhenitsyn said, marked one of three "times of troubles" in Russian history — which included the 17th century crises that led to the rise of the Romanovs and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted.

The author's last book, 2001's "Two Hundred Years Together," addressed the complex emotions of Russian-Jewish relations. Some criticized the book for alleged anti-Semitic passages. But the author denied the charge, saying he "understood the subtlety, sensitivity and kindheartedness of the Jewish character."

Yeltsin's successor Putin at first had a rocky relationship with Solzhenitsyn, who criticized the Russian president in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on Russia's oligarchs. Putin was also a veteran of the Soviet-era KGB, the agency that, more than any other, represented the Soviet legacy of repression.

But the two men, so different, gradually developed a rapport. By steps, Putin adopted Solzhenitsyn's criticisms of the West, perhaps out of a recognition that Russia really is a different civilization, perhaps because the author offered justification for the Kremlin's determination to muzzle critics, to reassert control over Russia's natural resources and to concentrate political power.

Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn argued that Russia was following its own path to its own form of democratic society. In a June 2005 interview with state television, he said Russia had lost 15 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union by moving too quickly in the rush to build a more liberal society.

"We need to be better, so we need to go more slowly," he said

Following the death of Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn became the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature. He is survived by his wife, Natalya, who acted as his spokesman, and his three sons, including Stepan, Ignat, a pianist and conductor, and Yermolai. All live in the United States.

____

By DOUGLAS BIRCH, Associated Press Writer

Correspondent Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this report

Aquinas' Advice for Intellectual Agnosticism

2008-07-08T18:44:00.003-04:00

So I'm reading this book ''Being and Goodness: The Concept of the Good in Metaphysics and Philosophical Theology," edited by Scott MacDonald to try and find a topic to write on for my metaphysics paper, which I need to get done by the end of the summer, before I start in the Comparative Religion program at WMU. While reading the introductory section, I ran across this statement, which I thought was very interesting, considering how agnostic and interfaith I seem to be when it comes to committing myself to one religious faith over another. So I guess this is for all the people in the world, like me, who are confused about the diversity of religious claims to exclusivist truth. Enjoy!

'Aquinas holds that in some cases, including those relevant to faith, the evidence for a given proposition entertained by the intellect is insufficient to move the intellect to assent. In cases of this sort (though, as he acknowledges, not in cases in which there is sufficient evident to move the intellect to assent) there is room for the will to move the intellect on the basis of its being drawn by the goodness of the object entertained.'
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My Entire Romantic Existence in One Paragraph

2008-07-03T04:39:00.002-04:00

So I was watching 'High Fidelity' with John and Joan Cusack and near the end of the movie he said this paragraph and I think it pretty much sums up all the romantic relationships that I've ever had.

'I can see now I never really committed to [insert former girlfriends name here]...I always had one foot out the door and that prevented me from doing a lot of things [that I shoulda done if I was really 'in' the relationship like I shoulda been]...I guess it made more sense to commit to nothing...keep my options open...and that's suicide by tiny, tiny increments.'

i hear lauren hill and the fugees in my head right now, i'm killing myself softly, aren't I?
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Another Victory for the USA Constitution

2008-06-26T16:50:00.003-04:00

I know a lot of people probably aren't happy about this, but this is a victory today, one more of our rights got upheld today by the Supreme Court, and even if it's not a right you think we should have, the very fact that you think we shouldn't have it is why it is so important to protect the rights that we do have, which this is one of them.

High court affirms gun rights in historic decision

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer

Silent on central questions of gun control for two centuries, the Supreme Court found its voice Thursday in a decision affirming the right to have guns for self-defense in the home and addressing a constitutional riddle almost as old as the republic over what it means to say the people may keep and bear arms.

The court's 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia's ban on handguns and imperiled similar prohibitions in other cities, Chicago and San Francisco among them. Federal gun restrictions, however, were expected to remain largely intact.

The court's historic awakening on the meaning of the Second Amendment brought a curiously mixed response, muted in some unexpected places.

The reaction broke less along party lines than along the divide between cities wracked with gun violence and rural areas where gun ownership is embedded in daily life. Democrats have all but abandoned their long push for stricter gun laws at the national level after deciding it's a losing issue for them. Republicans welcomed what they called a powerful precedent.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said merely that the court did not find an unfettered right to bear arms and that the ruling "will provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country." But another Chicagoan, Democratic Mayor Richard Daley, called the ruling "very frightening" and predicted more violence and higher taxes to pay for extra police if his city's gun restrictions are lost.

The court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791. The amendment reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

The basic issue for the justices was whether the amendment protects an individual's right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia, a once-vital, now-archaic grouping of citizens. That's been the heart of the gun control debate for decades.

The answer: Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said that an individual right to bear arms exists and is supported by "the historical narrative" both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.

President Bush said: "I applaud the Supreme Court's historic decision today confirming what has always been clear in the Constitution: the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear firearms."

The full implications of the decision, however, are not sorted out. Still to be seen, for example, is the extent to which the right to have a gun for protection in the home may extend outside the home.

Scalia said the Constitution does not permit "the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home." The court also struck down D.C. requirements that firearms be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled, but left intact the licensing of guns. The district allows shotguns and rifles to be kept in homes if they are registered, kept unloaded and taken apart or equipped with trigger locks.

Scalia noted that the handgun is Americans' preferred weapon of self-defense in part because "it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police."

But he said nothing in the ruling should "cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons or the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings."

And in a concluding paragraph to the 64-page opinion, Scalia said the justices in the majority "are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country" and believe the Constitution "leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns."

D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty responded with a plan to require residents to register their handguns. "More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence," Fenty said.

In a dissent he summarized from the bench, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority "would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons."

He said such evidence "is nowhere to be found."

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a separate dissent in which he said, "In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas."

Joining Scalia were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. The other dissenters were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter.

Gun rights advocates praised the decision. "I consider this the opening salvo in a step-by-step process of providing relief for law-abiding Americans everywhere that have been deprived of this freedom," said Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association.

The NRA will file lawsuits in San Francisco, Chicago and several Chicago suburbs challenging handgun restrictions there based on Thursday's outcome.

Some Democrats also welcomed the ruling.

"This opinion should usher in a new era in which the constitutionality of government regulations of firearms are reviewed against the backdrop of this important right," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

The capital's gun law was among the nation's strictest.

Dick Anthony Heller, 66, an armed security guard, sued the district after it rejected his application to keep a handgun at his Capitol Hill home a short distance from the Supreme Court.

"I'm thrilled I am now able to defend myself and my household in my home," Heller said shortly after the opinion was announced.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in Heller's favor and struck down the district's handgun ban, saying the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to own guns and a total prohibition on handguns is not compatible with that right.

The issue caused a split within the Bush administration. Vice President Dick Cheney supported the appeals court ruling, but others in the administration feared it could lead to the undoing of other gun regulations, including a federal law restricting sales of machine guns. Other laws keep felons from buying guns and provide for an instant background check.

The last Supreme Court ruling on the matter came in 1939 in U.S. v. Miller, which involved a sawed-off shotgun. Constitutional scholars agree it did not squarely answer the question of individual versus collective rights.

The case is District of Columbia v. Heller, 07-290.

Ontological Confusion: Infinitum non capax finiti

2008-06-23T17:16:00.002-04:00

I've decided to write a paper on divine transcendence for my independent study class with Quentin, and while researching exactly what the phrase 'Infinitum non capax finiti' means, I ran across this gentleman's blog and I'm going to use two things that he says in my paper! Hurray for the Internet! I've quoted the passages below, they are arguing against this concept.

‘Surely it is one thing to say that the finite creation is incapable of capturing and containing the infinite God and another thing entirely to affirm the ability of the infinite God to communicate himself without resistance by means of created being. I think that distinction is key.'

'Because God created the entire world, including both immaterial and material dimensions, he is free to unite himself with and use any portion of it that he desires. God finds no ontological “resistance” to his presence and action in his own creation.’

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Platonic Mysticism!!!

2008-06-20T05:20:00.002-04:00

i learned a new word tonight, it's called henosis, where have you been all my life, thank you pseudo, what could I do without you!!!
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Totally Awesome Christian Mysticism Site!

2008-06-18T01:46:00.002-04:00

here, here, and here are some links to the articles i actually read from this site, and here is a link to the guys blog page. i'll just copy what i said in my email that i sent out to my friends informing them about these sites below:

i'm sure some of you will disagree with a lot of what's said here, especially the 'god is love' section, but it presented some new arguments i haven't heard before for universal salvation and against eternal damnation (infinite punishment for a finite offense?), and the guy seems to know his scripture pretty well too.

also, i thought that the biblical panentheism section was just awesome, but i'm a panentheist, so of course i would think its awesome. begging my own question here i guess (does that even make sense?) oh yeah, it's about christian mysticism, and not about islam or sufism, for those of you who think i'm predictable. Enjoy!
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Universal Sufism

2008-06-17T19:31:00.002-04:00

I'm trying to do some research on divine transcendence and i ran across this wikipedia page, i thought it was pretty cool, so i've passed it on to ya'all. hope you enjoy it as much as i did!
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Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand

2008-06-16T14:02:00.001-04:00

This was another great article my buddy sent to me. thought i'd share it with all of you. please ignore the underlined sections, those are for me. enjoy!!!

By DAVID BARSTOW

April 20, 2008

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded "the gulag of our times" by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration's communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military analysts" whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration's war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

"It was them saying, 'We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,' " Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. "This was a coherent, active policy," he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

"Night and day," Mr. Allard said, "I felt we'd been hosed."

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. "The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people," Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, "a bit incredible" to think retired military officers could be "wound up" and turned into "puppets of the Defense Department."

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

"I'm not here representing the administration," Dr. McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts' interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon's campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as "message force multipliers" or "surrogates" who could be counted on to deliver administration "themes and messages" to millions of Americans "in the form of their own opinions."

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, "the Chris Matthews and the Wolf Blitzers of the world." Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

"Good work," Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. "We will use it."

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks' own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: "I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena."

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Marine colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he "is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration." One client told investors that Mr. Garrett's special access and decades of experience helped him "to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs" of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten "information you just otherwise would not get," from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. "You can't help but look for that," he said, adding, "If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. "That's good for everybody."

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. "Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay," he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. "You'll lose all access," Dr. McCausland said.

With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

"The impressions that you're getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false," Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on "Today." "There's been over $100 million of new construction," he reported. "The place is very professionally run."

Within days, transcripts of the analysts' appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Charting the Campaign

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon's dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called "information dominance." In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit "key influentials" — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld's priorities.

In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke's team, the military analysts were the ultimate "key influential" — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.

The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration's neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. "It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army," said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. "It is my life."

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke's team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. "We didn't want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out," Mr. Meyer said.

The Pentagon's regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the "media filter," each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be "writing the op-ed" for the war.

Assembling the Team

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke's team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

"Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees," said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. "We offer clients access to key decision makers," Dr. McCausland's team promised on the firm's Web site.

Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a "world affairs" analyst for CNN. "The Cohen Group knows that getting to 'yes' in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers," the company tells prospective clients on its Web site.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC's most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush's national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation's will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from "enemy" propaganda during Vietnam.

"We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped," he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach "MindWar" — using network TV and radio to "strengthen our national will to victory."

The Selling of the War

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld's private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

"Oh, you have no idea," Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. "You're back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV." It was, he said, "psyops on steroids" — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. "It's not like it's, 'We'll pay you $500 to get our story out,' " he said. "It's more subtle."

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive "war of liberation."

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke's staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

"You could see that they were messaging," Mr. Krueger said. "You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over." Some days, he added, "We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You'd look at them and say, 'This is working.' "

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. "Let's think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over," he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to "re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers," starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush's request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation's op-ed pages.

The trip invitation promised a look at "the real situation on the ground in Iraq."

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, "My Year in Iraq," that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had "about half the number of soldiers we needed here."

"We're up against a growing and sophisticated threat," Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.

That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women's rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The "growing and sophisticated threat" described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.

"We're winning," a briefing document proclaimed.

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly "artificial" that he joked to another group member that they were on "the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq," a reference to Mr. Romney's infamous claim that American officials had "brainwashed" him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president's $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of "up-armored" Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq's security forces.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.

Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.

"Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.," Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. "I tried to push hard with some of Bremer's people to engage these people of Al Anbar," he said.

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. "They can't shoot, but then again, they don't," one officer told them, according to one participant's notes.

"I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south," General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

"You can't believe the progress," General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be "down to a few numbers" within months.

"We could not be more excited, more pleased," Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

"I am so much against adding more troops," General Shepperd said on CNN.

Access and Influence

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that "mainstream" journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

"We're hitting a home run on this trip," a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its success only intensified the Pentagon's campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.

The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips "have the highest levels of visibility" at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld's closest aides, "picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars."

Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a "conscious decision" was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract "the increasingly negative view of the war" coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had "a more supportive view" of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. "On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen," he said.

For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. "You start to recognize what's most important to them," he said, adding, "There's nothing like seeing stuff firsthand."

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. "Of course we realized that," Mr. Krueger said. "We weren't naïve about that."

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the "hit," the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon "sources," the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

"They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level," Mr. Krueger said. "This has been highly honed."

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. "That's not something that ever crossed my mind," he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. "We assume they know where the lines are," he said.

The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of "key influentials" had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.

An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts "are having a greater impact" on network coverage of the military. "They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues," she wrote.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

"We knew we had extraordinary access," said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that "some four-star could call up and say, 'Kill that contract.' " For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq's security forces. "I know a snow job when I see one," he said. He did not share this on TV.

"Human nature," he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq's purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had "smoking gun" proof.

" 'We don't have any hard evidence,' " Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. "We are looking at ourselves saying, 'What are we doing?' "

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling "very disappointed" after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being "manipulated" to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

"There's no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart," Mr. Bevelacqua said. "You're talking about fighting a huge machine."

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

"Recall the stuff I did after my last visit," he wrote. "I will do the same this time."

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts' news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on "The O'Reilly Factor" or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

"Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all," the report concluded.

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable "surrogates" in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, "just upfront information," while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. "None of us drink the Kool-Aid," General Scales said.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. "Not related at all," General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN "in the lowest esteem."

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the "twisted version of reality" being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give "a heads-up" that some of his comments on Fox "may not all be friendly," Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld's senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O'Reilly that the United States was "not on a good glide path right now" in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was "precipitously fired from the analysts group" for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, "simply didn't like the fact that I wasn't carrying their water." The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines' deaths further erode support for the war.

"The strategic target remains our population," General Conway said. "We can lose people day in and day out, but they're never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen."

"General, I just made that point on the air," an analyst replied.

"Let's work it together, guys," General Conway urged.

The Generals' Revolt

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld's former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the "Generals' Revolt" dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to "give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here," Mr. Rumsfeld's office insisted that "the boss" wanted the meeting fast "for impact on the current story."

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

"Starting to write it now," General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. "Any input for the article," he added a little later, "will be much appreciated." Mr. Rumsfeld's office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

"Vallely is going to use the numbers," a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept "very formal," records show. "This is very, very sensitive now," a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

"I'm an old intel guy," said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers' names.) "And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, 'Oh my God, they're trying to brainwash.' "

"What are you, some kind of a nut?" Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. "You don't believe in the Constitution?"

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld's former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration's overall war strategy, they counseled, was "brilliant" and "very successful."

"Frankly," one participant said, "from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative."

An analyst said at another point: "This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn't mean a tinker's damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that's not a threat to us."

"Yeah," Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.

But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. "America hates a loser," one analyst said.

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the "political tide." One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to "just crush these people," and assured him that "most of the gentlemen at the table" would enthusiastically support him if he did.

"You are the leader," the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. "You are our guy."

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: "In one of your speeches you ought to say, 'Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.' And then you just go down the list and say, 'All right, we've got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.' If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, 'Oh my God, I can't imagine a world like that.' "

Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next "milestone" that would, as one analyst put it, "keep the American people focused on the idea that we're moving forward to a positive end." They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.

"When you said 'long war,' you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event," an analyst said. "And again, I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job..."

"Get in line," Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon's talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted "frequently and sufficiently" with his generals; that he was not "overly concerned" with the criticisms; that the meeting focused "on more important topics at hand," including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

"Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war."

"Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran."

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

"I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions," he said.

View From the Networks

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to "keep up the great work."

"Hey," Mr. Garrett said in an interview, "anything we can do to help."

For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.

Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.

"I don't think NBC was even aware we were participating," said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts' military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. "None of that ever happened," said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

"The worst conflict of interest was no interest."

Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts' business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: "We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest."

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network's military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. "We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised," he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives "refused to participate" in this article.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

"We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have," CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. "I mean, that's what McNeil does," he said.

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil's military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. "I've got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest," he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

"We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him," CNN said.

A Victory for the USA Constitution

2008-06-12T13:00:00.002-04:00

This court decision really made me proud to be an American today and I'm glad that some people in this country are still willing to defend our beloved Constitution (one of the greatest documents in existence, in my humble opinion) against the attacks that this Bush administration has attempted to level against it. This is why I still live in America and love her dearly, because despite her failings, she still has the heart of a champion.

High Court ruling may delay war crimes trials

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

In its third rebuke of the Bush administration's treatment of prisoners, the court ruled 5-4 that the government is violating the rights of prisoners being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba. The court's liberal justices were in the majority.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court, said, "The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times."

Kennedy said federal judges could ultimately order some detainees to be released, but that such orders would depend on security concerns and other circumstances.

The White House had no immediate comment on the ruling. White House press secretary Dana Perino, traveling with President Bush in Rome, said the administration was reviewing the opinion.

It was not immediately clear whether this ruling, unlike the first two, would lead to prompt hearings for the detainees, some of whom have been held more than 6 years. Roughly 270 men remain at the island prison, classified as enemy combatants and held on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.

The ruling could resurrect many detainee lawsuits that federal judges in Washington put on hold pending the outcome of the high court case. The decision sent judges, law clerks and court administrators scrambling to read Kennedy's 70-page opinion and figure out how to proceed. Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he would call a special meeting of federal judges to address how to handle the cases.

The decision also cast doubt on the future of the military war crimes trials that 19 detainees are facing so far. The Pentagon has said it plans to try as many as 80 men held at Guantanamo.

The lawyer for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's one-time driver, said he will seek dismissal of the charges against Hamdan based on Thursday's ruling. A military judge had already delayed the trial's start to await the high court ruling.

The administration opened the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to hold enemy combatants, people suspected of ties to al-Qaida or the Taliban.

The Guantanamo prison has been harshly criticized at home and abroad for the detentions themselves and the aggressive interrogations that were conducted there.

The court said not only that the detainees have rights under the Constitution, but that the system the administration has put in place to classify them as enemy combatants and review those decisions is inadequate.

The administration had argued first that the detainees have no rights. But it also contended that the classification and review process was a sufficient substitute for the civilian court hearings that the detainees seek.

In dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts criticized his colleagues for striking down what he called "the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants."

Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas also dissented.

Scalia said the nation is "at war with radical Islamists" and that the court's decision "will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed."

Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens joined Kennedy to form the majority.

Souter wrote a separate opinion in which he emphasized the length of the detentions.

"A second fact insufficiently appreciated by the dissents is the length of the disputed imprisonments, some of the prisoners represented here today having been locked up for six years," Souter said. "Hence the hollow ring when the dissenters suggest that the court is somehow precipitating the judiciary into reviewing claims that the military ... could handle within some reasonable period of time."

The court has ruled twice previously that people held at Guantanamo without charges can go into civilian courts to ask that the government justify their continued detention. Each time, the administration and Congress, then controlled by Republicans, changed the law to try to close the courthouse doors to the detainees.

The court specifically struck down a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that denies Guantanamo detainees the right to file petition of habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus is a centuries-old legal principle, enshrined in the Constitution, that allows courts to determine whether a prisoner is being held illegally.

The head of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents dozens of prisoners at Guantanamo, welcomed the ruling.

"The Supreme Court has finally brought an end to one of our nation's most egregious injustices," said CCR Executive Director Vincent Warren. "By granting the writ of habeas corpus, the Supreme Court recognizes a rule of law established hundreds of years ago and essential to American jurisprudence since our nation's founding."

Five alleged plotters of the Sept. 11 attacks appeared in a Guantanamo courtroom last week for a hearing before their war crimes trial, which prosecutors hope will start Sept. 15.

Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said he had no immediate information whether a hearing at Guantanamo for Canadian Omar Khadr, charged with killing a U.S. Special Forces soldier in Afghanistan, would go forward next week as planned.

Bush has said he wants to close the facility once countries can be found to take the prisoners who are there.

Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama also support shutting down the prison.

The Trinity: A Muslim Perspective

2008-06-03T23:02:00.010-04:00

I thought that this was an interesting article, so I sent it to some friends of mine. Here's one's response.

Noel said:

Interesting article. I do not know who Abdal-HakimMurad is, but he is clearly a well establishedscholar. Unfortunately for him, being a well established scholar does not entail having goodarguments, or a proper clarification of the trinity. For it seems to me that he has very bad arguments and an incorrect understanding of scripture. Allow me to demonstrate.

Murad says:

One of the virtues of the Semitic type of consciousness is the conviction that ultimate reality must be ultimately simple, and that the Nicene talk of a deity with three persons, one of whom has two natures, but who are all somehow reducible to authentic unity, quite apart from being rationally dubious, seems intuitively wrong. God, the final ground of all being, surely does not need to be so complicated.

Now what does Murad mean here by ultimately simple? Avery large portion in the history of Christian theology has maintained God's simplicity, his not having properties which are distinct from him. But perhaps, as seems likely, Murad has in mind here God's not being triune, or having two, three, or four persons make up the Godhead? Well, why is that a virtue? I suppose because there is something neat, if you will, or clean, about there being only one person that makes up the Godhead. Or in a similar vein,using good ol' Ockam, why should we multiply entities beyond necessity? But of course we may always ask if there are compelling reasons to believe in a Godhead composed of many persons as opposed to just one. I think there are, but I will not elaborate here since this would take a paper unto itself.

Furthermore, it is highly debatable whether God DID have to be that complex. After all, did the second person of the trinity really have to take on humanness, and so have two natures, or was it a choice He was not compelled to make on the basis of His nature? And how exactly is all this rationally dubious?!? Granted, it stretches the mind to think of one Godhead composed of three persons. But shouldn't many of God's attributes be perplexing? Have an air of paradox? It is not as if there is a contradiction involved. And Murad has done nothing to show that there is any rational dubiousness involved.

Murad says:

...that Jesus of Nazareth himself never believed, or taught, that he was the second person of a divine trinity. We know that he was intensely conscious of God as a divine and loving Father, and that he dedicated his ministry to proclaiming the imminence of God's kingdom, and to explaining how human creatures could transform themselves in preparation for that momentous time. He believed himself to be the Messiah,and the 'son of man' foretold by the prophets. We know from the study of first-century Judaism, recently made accessible by the Qumran discoveries, that neither of these terms would have been understood as implying divinity: they merely denoted purified servants of God.

Oh really! It is very interesting to note that the term "THE Son of Man" with the definite article 'THE' indicating uniqueness, is used eighty-four times in the gospels by Jesus only, and to Jesus only, and once in Acts by Stephen. They did not say 'A son of man' which would have been more likely if Jesus was one of many sons of men. Furthermore, there is strong scriptural support that 'the son of man' did have divine implications. Daniel 7:13 says "and behold,one like the son of man coming with the clouds ofheaven! ...and to Him was given dominion and gloryand kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away." Clearly the son of man here in Daniel is a divine being, for the language here is language that is only attributable to God! And it is evident that the high priests in Jesus time were more than cognizant of this. Matthew26:63-66 makes this abundantly clear. They ask Jesus if he is the Christ, the Son of God, and he says "It is as you said. Nevertheless, I say to you, hereafter you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Power, and coming on the clouds of heaven." To this the high priests responded by tearing their clothes, and saying "He has spoken blasphemy! What further need do we have of witnesses?...He is deserving of death."

Since it is unmistakably clear that Jesus is referring to himself as the some of man spoken of in Daniel, and it is unmistakably clear that that figure is divine, no wonder the high priests wanted to kill him! They were more than cognizant of Daniel 7, and knew what Jesus was saying by identifying himself with the son of man. Indeed, why would they put him to death if he was merely claiming to be a purified servant of God! Murad has not done his homework.

Furthermore, while it is true that the term 'Messiah'(which means anointed one) did imply, for some rabbinic scholars, only esteemed servanthood, it did not for all. There were many rabbinic scholars both prior to Jesus and present with him who thought that THE coming Messiah would be divine. There was not consensus in the Jewish world as to the nature that THE coming messiah would take.

It is also very interesting that Murad ONLY focuses here on two titles of Jesus, But there are many more that Jesus used of himself that imply his divinity. In John 8:57, Jesus refers to himself as the I AM. Hesays, "before Abraham was, I AM." Now this is very interesting because Jesus is clearly making a reference to Exodus 3:14, where God identifies Himselfto Moses as "I AM WHO I AM" And of course, what happened when Jesus said that? They tried to stone him for his apparent blasphemy!

Jesus, in Revelation 22:13 Jesus calls himself "The Alpha and Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End", a title used of God the Father in Revelation 1:8. So Jesus here is equating Himself with God.

Jesus did not rebuke Thomas (John 20:28) when Thomas said of him "My Lord and My God". But if Jesus was merely a servant of God, surely he would have rebuked Thomas here.

And there are many other reasons to believe that Jesus himself either explicitly or implicitly affirmed His divinity. Murad is therefore wrong in asserting that Jesus never did.

Murad says:

There are other implications of Trinitarian doctrine which concern Muslims. Perhaps one should briefly mention our worries about the doctrine of Atonement,which implies that God is only capable of really forgiving us when Jesus has borne our just punishment by dying on the cross. John Hick has remarked that 'a forgiveness that has to be bought by full payment of the moral debt is not in fact forgiveness at all.' More coherent, surely, is the teaching of Jesus himself in the parable of the prodigal son, who is fully forgiven by his father despite the absence of a blood sacrifice to appease his sense of justice. TheLord's Prayer, that superb petition for forgiveness, nowhere implies the need for atonement or redemption.

Jesus' own doctrine of God's forgiveness as recorded in the Gospels is in fact entirely intelligible in terms of Old Testament and Islamic conceptions. 'God can forgive all sins', says the Quran.

Now Murad here, once again, gets things all wrong. The term 'forgiveness' as used by scripture, in terms of God forgiving our sins, minimally means that God no longer holds our sins against us. Or what is very similar, when God forgives us our sins, our sins no longer separate us from God. But then OF COURSE a precondition to forgiveness is a sacrifice. If a precondition of God no longer holding our sins against us, of our sins no longer separating us from God, is an atonement for those sins, then it follows trivially that a sacrifice is a precondition for forgiveness. And why is this so incoherent, as Murad implies? He says that the parable of the prodigal son has no mention of atonement or blood sacrifice. But what follows from this? First of all, not all atonement for sin in the Old Testament required a blood sacrifice. There were grain, drink, and incense offerings. So the fact that no BLOOD offering is mentioned does very little work for Murad. Secondly,the point of that parable was not to lay out all the fine intricacies of proper ceremonial and sacrificial practices, but to show the loving heart of the father. A heart that reflected God's heart towards Israel. Furthermore, any half-minded Jew would have known that in order to be forgiven by God, a NECESSARY condition (not sufficient) was that a sacrifice be made. It is even further dubious that Murad focuses on only one saying of Jesus, and not His many others about His death and His role in taking away sin. See Matthew26:39, Luke 24:25-26, John 1:29; 6:51; 10:11 are just a few.

Murad says the Lord's prayer nowhere implies the need for atonement or redemption. Well, it actually does, implicitly, imply both. That this is so is due to the fact that the Lord's prayer was given to Jews, and for Jews the whole concept of divine forgiveness necessarily involved sacrifice, and therefore atonement, and redemption.

Murad is right that Jesus view of forgiveness are entirely intelligible with the Old Testaments. But the Old Testament's doctrine of forgiveness of sins involves sacrifice and atonement. But then so must the view that Jesus embraced. IF JESUS DID NOT ACCEPT SACRIFICE AND ATONEMENT THEN THE VIEW THAT JESUS EMBRACED WOULD NOT BE INTELLIGIBLE WITH THE OLD TESTAMENT.

Finally, and perhaps trivially, Murad is not using the standard meaning of unity here when he says that God is a unity. For a unity implies a plurality. And a unified plurality is precisely what the Christian conception of God is. If there is any God that is a unity it is the God of the Bible. But since Islam does not want a plurality, they must eschew a unity. To be fair, I am not claiming that Murad is being inconsistent. Only that he needs to be clear.

In conclusion, this was just a terrible and woefully inadequate account and criticism of the trinity, as I hope to have shown.

P.S. Sorry for any typos. I wrote this as fast as I could and with little attention to grammar and spelling. Not all of us have all the time in the world!

"Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who turn many to righteousness like the stars forever and ever." Daniel 12:3

I replied:

thanks so much for the long and well-thought out reply. I didn't think you would even read this article, much less give such a lengthy and well reasoned reply. I appreciate your thoughts regarding this and because you spent so much time and effort giving such a great response, I felt obligated to respond to your responses as well. As I agree with much of what the article says, I will argue from my interpretation and perspective regarding it. I dont' know if it is necessarily how a muslim would respond, so I'm not claiming that, but since I did agree with much of the article, I'll put on my Muslim hat and try to respond the best I can, keeping in mind that this is not necessarily how a Muslim would respond.

You ask the question 'Now what does Murad mean here by ultimately simple?' and then you go on to state that 'A very large portion in the history of Christian theology has maintained God's simplicity, his not having properties which are distinct from him.' However, this is not what I think Murad means here. I dont think he is talking about divine simplicity, I think he is talking about simplicity meaning easy to understand, contrasted with complexity, meaning difficult to understand. At least that is how I interpreted this statement.

Maybe a better way he could have put it, to avoid any confusion, is that say that the Islamic conception of strict monotheism seems to be prima facie simpler, meaning easier to understand, than the Christan conception of a triune monotheism, which seems to be prima facie more difficult to understand, especially when one looks at the controversy within Christianity itself about what the trinity exactly is and how to understand it. I think your statement that 'Granted, it stretches the mind to think of one Godhead composed of three persons.' is a more accurate description of what he was trying to say, but I could be wrong about this. however, that's how i interpreted him.

In addition to this, whether one regards the trinity as rationally dubious or not, I think he was just trying to give his own intuition regarding it. I think that's why he said at the end of that sentence that the idea of the trinity seems 'intuitively wrong.' So I think he was more trying to express his own intuitions, and maybe those of other Muslims, when he made that statement, not necessarily trying to give a complex argument about why the trinity is conclusively rationally dubious. but regardless, you are correct when you state that 'It is not as if there is a contradiction involved. And Murad has done nothing to show that there is any rational dubiousness involved.' I do agree with you that he hasn't shown the dubiousness, but I don't think it was his point too, he was just expressing his intutions regarding it, that is all.

As far as the next part, regarding Jesus divinity, I must say that I agree with the Muslim perspective when they state 'that Jesus of Nazareth himself never believed, or taught, that he was the second person of a divine trinity.' but I think that this is a different claim from the claim that jesus was divine. This is because I believe that everybody is divine, in so much as everybody has a soul and the soul is divine, that is why I agree with the article when it says that 'A few years previously, the twelfth-century theologian Al-Ghazali (the founder of Sufism) had summed up the dangers of ghuluww when he wrote that the Christians had been so dazzled by the divine light reflected in the mirror like heart of Jesus, that they mistook the mirror for the light itself, and worshipped it.' I think that this happened to the Apostles and is still happening with Christians today.

But I disagree with Muslims when they state that 'The Qur'anic term for 'exaggeration' used here, ghuluww, became a standard term in Muslim heresiography for any tendency, Muslim or otherwise, which attributed divinity to a revered and charismatic figure.' I think that you can attribute a certain amount of divinity to every person and every thing in existence, because I believe we all have a piece of the divine within us, (I also think that Sufism agrees with me on this point), but it is a whole other step to claim that somebody is God incarnate themselves, or the second person of a divine trinity.

So I guess that I hold the Muslim view 'that the Hellenized Christ, who in one nature was of one substance with God, and in another nature was of one substance with humanity, bore no significant resemblance to the ascetic prophet who had walked the roads of Galilee some three centuries before.' But I disagree with the Muslim view that jesus had absolutely no divinity at all.

In fact, I think that he might have been the most divine person to ever exist, when that divinity is understood as al-ghazali's divine light, and I think that other people in history, like Ghandi and Dr. King, were able to let their own divine light of their soul shine through their beings. I think that this is actually the purpose of human existence, to completely align and harmonize your 'earthly' self with your 'divine' self while living our lives, but even if this harmonization took place and one has completely harmonized their dual selves (as I believe jesus was able to do, 100% human, 100% divine as the catholics profess), this is still not the same thing being God Incarnate or the second person of a divine trinity. There is a world of difference between these two.

Some may view me as splitting hairs here and say if you believe Jesus was able to achieve this complete harmonization, why can't you take the additional step and beleive he was God incarnate? this is because to do this, would be, in essence, to confuse a part with the whole. I believe that all of our souls are somehow connected to or a part of God, but only a part. I believe that all of these souls somehow form a 'super-soul' which is God. I can't exactly explain the specifics of how this all works, and that is obviously a weakness in my position, but it is something I beleive nonetheless. So to say that one human soul is God is therefore to equate a part of God with the whole, which is God, which is incorrect and I believe a form of idolotry. I don't know if this is the Muslim view or not, but it's my view, so I thought i would share it with you.

you also quote daniel when you say that 'Daniel 7:13 says "and behold, one like the son of man coming with the clouds of heaven! ...and to Him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languagesshould serve him; His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away." Clearly the son of man here in Daniel is a divine being, for the language here is language that is only attributable to God!' But I disagree with you here. On my theology, that language doesn't necessarily have to be 'only attributable to God' but could be attributed to Jesus, without Jesus being God incarnate or the second person of a divine trinity. But I digress...

you also use the gospel of john in your arguments, and many christians do, in order to affirm jesus's identity with God, but I'm sure a Muslim would not accept John's gospel as being authentically the words of jesus, I know that I do not. It was written in 110 AD, 80 years after the death of jesus and has heavy gnostic overtones and it is because of these gnostic overtones that I think that most, if not all of the gospel of john, must be interpreted allegorically and metaphorically, not literally. when one interprets it in this way, al-ghazali's statement becomes more and more true and a lot of the argument for the incarnation and the trinity falls by the wayside. but obviously, this is a hermenutical (spelling?) issue and I'm sure that we will disagree on how exactly it should be interpreted. that's a big reason i've wanted to get a religion degree here as well, hopefully, i can study some hermenuetics, but i probably have to go to a theology school to do that.

also, one of the Muslims chief claims is that the christian scripture has been corrupted and I'm sure that they would claim that the gospel of john is evidence of this corruption. This is one of the chief reasons that Islam was invented in the first place, so that the world would have a scripture this is incorruptable. The Quran is suppossed to be this scripture and it claims that angels themselves will guard it to make sure it is not corrupted.

I dont' necessarily believe this, about the quran I mean, but I do believe that only the gospel Q is the authentic words of Jesus and that everything else was added after the fact, in order to meld the myth of the Jewish messiah with the pagan godman mystery religions that were all the rage in the mediterranean at that time. that is a big reason why I agree with more the muslim view of jesus than the christian view, although i disagree if the muslim view means jesus was not at all divine.

you also state that 'But then OF COURSE a precondition to forgiveness is a sacrifice.' and later that 'Furthermore, any half-minded Jew would have known that in order to be forgiven by God, a NECESSARY condition (not sufficient) was that a sacrifice be made. It is even further dubious that Murad focuses on only one saying of Jesus, and not His many others about His death and His role in taking away sin. See Matthew 26:39, Luke 24:25-26, John 1:29; 6:51; 10:11 are just a few.' but I, and I think a muslim as well, would disagree with the idea that a sacrifice is a necessary condition for the forgiveness of sins. I think that one could argue that God is so loving and so merciful that a blood sacrifice is not necessary for the forgiveness of sins, indeed, no sacrifice is necessary when the prodigal son parable is interpreted in the way murad has interpreted it.

so i guess that i'm saying that I think a muslim would respond that god's omni-benevolence does not require a sacrifice or an atonement, that putting this constraint on God diminishes his omni-benevolence and that we are anthropomorphizing God by putting our own ideas of justice and benevolence onto him. that his benevolent nature is such that no sacrifice or atonement is necessary. i dont' know if i necessarily believe this, but i could see somebody responding in this way. and since those passages that you quoted are not from the gospel Q, I could see a muslim saying that they were latter additions by the gospel writers themselves, in order to more fully judaize jesus and make his radical ethic of love fit inside their conception of God's forgiveness. so i guess one could argue that jesus conception of forgiveness is not in fact intelligible with the old testament view.

so this is my response, as incoherent and skeptical as it may be. i hope that i have further clarified my own positions regarding this issue, as many of them fall in accord with Islam, but some of them do not. i also hope that i have represented a muslim response well, but since i am not a muslim, i dont' know if i have or not. i look forward to response and your attempt to destroy my skeptical and quasi-islamic arguments. :) talk to you soon

Alex said:

I finally printed this article and will read it today and perhaps give a reply in the near future. I will simply state one thing namely that the doctrine of the Trinity is not a belief that can be rationally proved and the only way to know of it in an intimate manner which penetrates to the depths of one's soul and becomes firmly accepted by the intellect is through an act of faith. As such the revelation of the Trinity gives to mankind a knowledge, albeit in an obscure manner since no one can penetrate the depths of the mystery of the inner life of God. One of the key points in the Catholic understanding of the Trinity is how the relationship between the Three Persons is predicated upon their Love for one another. Anyway, hopefully (I am not making any promises...lol) I will write something with at least a minimum of intelligence.

Noel said:

Thanks as well for the response. But I have a just afew things to say...

You say: You ask the question 'Now what does Murad mean here by ultimately simple?' and then you go on to state that 'A very large portion in the history of Christian theology has maintained God's simplicity, his not having properties which are distinct from him.' However, this is not what I think Murad means here. I dont think he is talking about divine simplicity, I think he is talking about simplicity meaning easy to understand, contrasted with complexity, meaning difficult to understand. At least that is how I interpreted this statement... I think your statement that 'Granted, it stretches the mind to think of one Godhead composed of three persons.' is a more accurate description of what he was trying to say,

That's right, and I was clear that that was what he probably meant.

You say again: In addition to this, whether one regards the trinity as rationally dubious or not, I think he was just trying to give his own intuition regarding it... So I think he was more trying to express his own intuitions, and maybe those of other Muslims, when he made that statement, not necessarily trying to give a complex argument about why the trinity is conclusively rationally dubious.

I was never claiming he was trying to give a complex argument. But if you are going to say that you think something is rationally dubious, then you had either better give some reasons why, or be explicit and say that this is just your opinion and you either cannot substantiate it or will not. Murad does neither.

You say: As far as the next part, regarding Jesus divinity, I must say that I agree with the Muslim perspective when they state 'that Jesus of Nazareth himself never believed, or taught, that he was the second person of a divine trinity.' but I think that this is a different claim from the claim that jesus was divine. This is because I believe that everybody is divine, in so much as everybody has a soul and the soul is divine, that is why I agree with the article when it says that 'A few years previously, the twelfth-century theologian Al-Ghazali (the founder of Sufism) had summed up the dangers of ghuluww when he wrote that the Christians had been so dazzled by the divine light reflected in the mirror like heart of Jesus, that they mistook the mirror for the light itself, and worshipped it.' I think that this happened to the Apostles and is still happening with Christians today.

Jason, you're killing me here! You are clearly equivocating on 'divine' here. What is in mind is whether or not Jesus is God. You can use divine however you want, but the debate here is whether or not Jesus is God, not whether or not he has somed ivine part in light of having a soul. Let's keep to the original debate and not get sidetracked here.

You say : In fact, I think that he might have been the most divine person to ever exist, when that divinity is understood as al-ghazali's divine light, and I think that other people in history, like Ghandi and Dr. King, were able to let their own divine light of their soul shine through their beings. I think that this is actually the purpose of human existence, to completely align and harmonize your 'earthly' self with your 'divine' self while living our lives, but even if this harmonization took place and one has completely harmonized their dual selves (as I believe jesus was able to do, 100% human, 100%> divine as the catholics profess), this is still not the same thing being God Incarnate or the second person of a divine trinity. There is a world of difference between these two.

Let's keep to the debate here...WHETHER OR NOT JESUS WAS FULLY GOD AND WHETHER OR NOT THE BIBLE TEACHES THIS.

You say: you also quote daniel when you say that 'Daniel 7:13 says "and behold, one like the son of man coming with the clouds of heaven! ...and to Him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; His dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away." Clearly the son of man here in Daniel is a divine being, for the language here is language that is only attributable to God!' But I disagree with you here. On my theology, that language doesn't necessarily have to be 'only attributable to God' but could be attributed to Jesus, without Jesus being God incarnate or the second person of a divine trinity. But I digress...

As you should. For you are not at all familiar with old testament theology here, nor with 1st centuryJewish beliefs, nor with biblical theology at that! Well, maybe on YOUR theology Daniel 7 need not imply that the son of man is God, but with all do respect, we are not concerned with your theology, but with biblical theology. I thought this much should have been obvious, for even Murad tries to give arguments on the basis of what scripture says (however erroneous). And clearly, for any Jew, the language attributable to the son of man in Daniel 7 clearly implies that the son of man there is God. To attribute to a being the properties of being served by all nations, peoples, tongues, and having a dominion that will not end to a person other than God would have been blasphemous! Is not this obvious? It is very bad exegesis to take a scripture and interpret it in such a way that it pays NO attention to the context and time in which it is was written.

You say: you also use the gospel of john in your arguments, and many christians do, in order to affirm jesus's identity with God, but I'm sure a Muslim would not accept John's gospel as being authentically the words of jesus, I know that I do not. It was written in 110 AD, 80 years after the death of jesus and has heavy gnostic overtones and it is because of these gnostic overtones that I think that most, if not all of the gospel of john, must be interpreted allegorically and metaphorically, not literally. when one interprets it in this way, al-ghazali's statement becomes more and more true and a lot of the argument for the incarnation and the trinity falls by the wayside. but obviously, this is a hermenutical (spelling?) issue and I'm sure that we will disagree on how exactly it should be interpreted. that's a big reason i've wanted to get a religion degree here as well, hopefully, i can study some hermenuetics, but i probably have to go to a theology school to do that.

Well, it is, of course, debatable whether or not John was written that late. But this is another matter. To be sure, perhaps many Muslims would not count the gospel of John as trustworthy. But I do not see where this gets us. I don't think that the Quran is divinely inspired, and so I could just dismiss much of what it has to say. But all this is wrongheaded here in the present debate! For we are concerned with whether or not Jesus in the gospels teaches that He is God. I think that is why Murad himself mentions biblical scripture. He is trying to say (or so it seems to me since he uses scripture) that one cannot conclude from scripture (the gospels) that Jesus is God. Now it is a whole other question whether or not the books of the bible are authentic, or reliable,etc. But what we are concerned with here is whether or not scripture teaches that Jesus is God, regardless of the time the gospels were written or are trustworthy. It seems to me that you have confused the two issues, and so it is irrelevant to claim that John was written late, which is a contentious claim anyway.

You say: I do believe that only the gospel Q is the authentic words of Jesus and that everything else was added after the fact, in order to meld the myth of the Jewish messiah with the pagan godman mystery religions that were all the rage in the mediterranean at that time. that is a big reason why I agree with more the muslim view of jesus than the christian view, although i disagree if the muslim view means jesus was not at all divine.

This is all irrelevant here in the present debate, as was showed above. But just a quick note. The gospel Q has never been found. It was postulated in order to make sense of the synoptic gospels (their very strong similarity). In fact, Q got its name from the german word 'quelle' which just means source. Now there may have been such a thing as Q (and if fact, I am not opposed to this at all, and neither are a great many biblical scholars), but why believe that only what Q says (which is just what the synoptic gospels agree about) should be taken as valid? Either way, this is all irrelevant in this debate!

You say: You also state that 'But then OF COURSE a preconditionto forgiveness is a sacrifice.' and later that 'Furthermore, any half-minded Jew would have known that in order to be forgiven by God, a NECESSARYcondition (not sufficient) was that a sacrifice be made. It is even further dubious that Murad focuses on only one saying of Jesus, and not His many others about His death and His role in taking away sin. See Matthew 26:39, Luke 24:25-26, John 1:29; 6:51; 10:11 are just a few.' but I, and I think a muslim as well, would disagree with the idea that a sacrifice is a necessary condition for the forgiveness of sins. I think that one could argue that God is so loving and so merciful that a blood sacrifice is not necessary for the forgiveness of sins, indeed, no sacrifice is necessary when the prodigal son parable is interpreted in the way murad has interpreted it.

You're killing me here once again, for you have clearly failed to understand both Murad and me! Obviously Muslims (and you as well) do not think that a blood sacrifice is necessary for forgiveness. But THAT IS NOT WHAT IS UP FOR DEBATE!!! Murad was trying to show that the gospels does not teach that a blood sacrifice was necessary. I showed that it was! Just a cursory reading of the Old Testament will show why the Jesus in the gospels does think this! The question here is not what Muslims or you believe, but about what the Bible (the gospels) teaches. After all, is this not why Murad himself is using scripture? If we was just concerned with what Muslims believe,then he would not have to quote the bible. He could just quote some passages from the Quran. But he DID quote the bible because he WAS trying to show that Jesus did not believe in a blood sacrifice. But I have show why Jesus did believe in a blood sacrifice. You have not given any exegetical argument here, but merely asserted something we all know. That muslims do not believe in a blood sacrifice.

Furthermore, you have completely discarded my argument given to you in conversation about Jesus being a sacrifice, and therefore appeasing God's wrath and satisfying His justice. The biblical account of atonement satisfies two VERY important desiderata, namely, God's love and mercy AND His wrath and justice. The islamic conception fails here at this point. but you say...

so i guess that i'm saying that I think a muslim would respond that god's omni-benevolence does not require a sacrifice or an atonement, that putting this constraint on God diminishes his omni-benevolence and that we are anthropomorphizing God by putting our own ideas of justice and benevolence onto him. that his benevolent nature is such that no sacrifice or atonement is necessary. i dont' know if i necessarily believe this, but i could see somebody responding in this way. and since those passages that you quoted are not from the gospel Q, I could see a muslim saying that they were latter additions by the gospel writers themselves, in order to more fully judaize jesus and make his radical ethic of love fit inside their conception of God's forgiveness. so i guess one could argue that jesus conception of forgiveness is not in fact intelligible with the old testament view.

But Jason, why am I guilty here of anthropomorphizing here any more than the Muslim? And how in the world does it diminish God's love? I know you do not necessarily believe this, but I would want an answer here from the Muslim. And the appeal to Q is, again, besides the point in the present context. Once again, it is one thing to make claims about what scriptural portions are reliable or not, and then make arguments using those scriptures, and another to ask what the Bible, or here, the gospels, teach. If Murad were going to discount the gospel John, he sure did not say so. And it seems as if he was trying to show that theJesus of the Bible did not teach trinity or a blood sacrifice. But the Jesus of the Bible includes the Jesus found in John, and Murad said nothing at all about the status of John's book.

Thanks Jason for your lengthy response, even if Idisagreed heartily! Much appreciated man. I'll talk to you soon bro.

I replied:

sorry its' taken me so long to respond to your response, but i wanted to read the article over again, even more closely than i did the second time i read it to respond to your original response, to answer some of your claims. so here goes.

noel says that I am 'clearly equivocating on 'divine' here. What is in mind is whether or not Jesus is God.' But I don't think I am equivocating on divine here because i do not think that this is what is up for issue. I think what is up for issue here is whether or not, in murad's words, 'Jesus of Nazareth himself never believed, or taught, that he was the second person of a divine trinity.'

I think that the confusion is coming in here because in my eyes, the issue whether or not jesus taught that he was god incarnate or not and the issue of whether jesus taught that he was the second person in a divine trinity or not are two seperate issues, whereas I think that for you Noel, these two issues are one and the same issue. i think that you can have jesus being god incarnate without being a part of a divine trinity and you can have a divine trinity without jesus being god incarnate. i thought that murad was arguing that jesus did not teach that he was the second part of a divine trinity, not that jesus did not teach that he was god incarnate. he is clearly arguing against jesus divinity, but i understood it to be an article arguing against his divinity characterized as a divine trinity, not necessarily arguing against his divinity characterized as god incarnate. but maybe i'm still failing to understand what is at issue here or what murad is arguing against here.

i do agree with you that murad is trying to argue, from a biblical perspective, that jesus did not teach that he was the second person of a divine trinity. the line in the article that confirmed this for me was when he writes that 'One of Reuther's own main objections to the Trinity, apart from its historically and Biblically sketchy foundations, is its emphatic attribution of masculine gender to God.' murad is here inserting his own opinion that the doctrine of the trinity has 'historically and biblically sketchy foundations.' so i think you are right when you state that what is at issue is what the bible teaches in regards to the trinity, but does this necessarily have to do with the issue of whether jesus is god incarnate, as my above paragraph tries to clarify?

after reading the rest of your response, i think that i can't say anymore until this previous issue gets clarified. i think a lot of what i will or won't say hinges on this issue, whether the trinity and the incarnation can be seperated or not and whether murad believes this or doesn't.
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This guy is totally awesome! (He's pretty smart too)

2008-05-19T18:41:00.003-04:00

His name is Abdal-Hakim Murad and i've already read these two (here and here) articles from him and loved both of them, so I thought I would share them with ya'all. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did!

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Emanation and Ascent in Hermetic Kabbalah

2008-05-10T02:10:00.006-04:00

what else do i have to say, you know i love mysticism, preach on brothers, oh yeah, my favorite line from the entire thing so far is this one, 'the task of the Kabbalist is to rectify this fallen condition by acts that unify elements which have become separated.' Sidi always loved talking about the unity, didn't he? I miss you Jan, maybe one day, we'll meet again!

this one is good for Dr. Money as well, as well as for my Nietzsche book, if that ever happens. 'There is a tendency for dualist systems to be life-denying – the world of spirit is valued more than the world of the flesh. There is an equivalent tendency for monist systems to be life-affirming, as every thing, evil as well as good, is seen to be rooted in the same ultimate source of being.' Witherall did call Nietzsche a monistic mystic, didn't he?

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Mystical Monotheism

2008-02-06T00:12:00.000-05:00

So I'm reading this book 'The Problem of Existence' by Arthur Witherall for my Metaphysics class with Quentin, and I ran across these two passages which were so awesome I just had to record them for you all to see. Hope you enjoyed them as much as I did!

this is a passage from the Rig Veda, one which I've probably quoted before

'And in the ONE there arose love: Love the first seed of the soul. The truth of this the sages found in their hearts: seeking in their hearts with wisdom, the sages found that bond of union between Being and non-being.' p82.

and

'The essence of mystical theism is the feeling that, as William Blake said, we can see a world in a grain of sand [the whole universe existing inside of each particular in the universe], and heaven in a wild flower [the realm of God is all around you]. It is a direct intuition that the infinite has been realized here and now within finite things. This intuition is not universal, and the paradox involved in its expression that the whole may transcend itself, may lead us to unbelief through incomprehension. Yet this sense of incomprehension has two sides to it. For where the atheist finds a plain contradiction, the believer recognizes the mystery of divine love.' p85

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Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites"

2007-12-19T18:06:00.000-05:00

A Yemeni man never charged by the U.S. details 19 months of brutality and psychological torture -- the first in-depth, first-person account from inside the secret U.S. prisons. A Salon exclusive.

By Mark Benjamin

Dec. 15, 2007 | The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated in its network of secret prisons known as "black sites." But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on -- there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.

The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation -- one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.

It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words "I am innocent" in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.

So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not let him die.

On several occasions, when Bashmilah's state of mind deteriorated dangerously, the CIA also did something else: They placed him in the care of mental health professionals. Bashmilah believes these were trained psychologists or psychiatrists. "What they were trying to do was to give me a sort of uplifting and to assure me," Bashmilah said in a telephone interview, through an interpreter, speaking from his home country of Yemen. "One of the things they told me to do was to allow myself to cry, and to breathe."

Last June, Salon reported on the CIA's use of psychologists to aid with the interrogation of terrorist suspects. But the role of mental health professionals working at CIA black sites is a previously unknown twist in the chilling, Kafkaesque story of the agency's secret overseas prisons.

Little about the conditions of Bashmilah's incarceration has been made public until now. His detailed descriptions in an interview with Salon, and in newly filed court documents, provide the first in-depth, first-person account of captivity inside a CIA black site. Human rights advocates and lawyers have painstakingly pieced together his case, using Bashmilah's descriptions of his cells and his captors, and documents from the governments of Jordan and Yemen and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to verify his testimony. Flight records detailing the movement of CIA aircraft also confirm Bashmilah's account, tracing his path from the Middle East to Afghanistan and back again while in U.S. custody.

Bashmilah's story also appears to show in clear terms that he was an innocent man. After 19 months of imprisonment and torment at the hands of the CIA, the agency released him with no explanation, just as he had been imprisoned in the first place. He faced no terrorism charges. He was given no lawyer. He saw no judge. He was simply released, his life shattered.

"This really shows the human impact of this program and that lives are ruined by the CIA rendition program," said Margaret Satterthwaite, an attorney for Bashmilah and a professor at the New York University School of Law. "It is about psychological torture and the experience of being disappeared."

Bashmilah, who at age 39 is now physically a free man, still suffers the mental consequences of prolonged detention and abuse. He is undergoing treatment for the damage done to him at the hands of the U.S. government. On Friday, Bashmilah laid out his story in a declaration to a U.S. district court as part of a civil suit brought by the ACLU against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing accused of facilitating secret CIA rendition flights.

Bashmilah said in the phone interview that the psychological anguish inside a CIA black site is exacerbated by the unfathomable unknowns for the prisoners. While he figured out that he was being held by Americans, Bashmilah did not know for sure why, where he was, or whether he would ever see his family again. He said, "Every time I realize that there may be others who are still there where I suffered, I feel the same thing for those innocent people who just fell in a crack."

It may seem bizarre for the agency to provide counseling to a prisoner while simultaneously cracking him mentally -- as if revealing a humanitarian aspect to a program otherwise calibrated to exploit systematic psychological abuse. But it could also be that mental healthcare professionals were enlisted to help bring back from the edge prisoners who seemed precariously damaged, whose frayed minds were no longer as pliable for interrogation. "My understanding is that the purpose of having psychiatrists there is that if the prisoner feels better, then he would be able to talk more to the interrogators," said Bashmilah.

Realistically, psychiatrists in such a setting could do little about the prisoners' deeper suffering at the hands of the CIA. "They really had no authority to address these issues," Bashmilah said about his mental anguish. He said the doctors told him to "hope that one day you will prove your innocence or that you will one day return to your family." The psychiatrists also gave him some pills, likely tranquilizers. They analyzed his dreams. But there wasn't much else they could do. "They also gave me a Rubik's Cube so I could pass the time, and some jigsaw puzzles," Bashmilah recalled.

The nightmare started for him back in fall 2003. Bashmilah had traveled to Jordan from Indonesia, where he was living with his wife and working in the clothing business. He and his wife went to Jordan to meet Bashmilah's mother, who had also traveled there. The family hoped to arrange for heart surgery for Bashmilah's mother at a hospital in Amman. But before leaving Indonesia, Bashmilah had lost his passport and had received a replacement. Upon arrival in Jordan, Jordanian officials questioned his lack of stamps in the new one, and they grew suspicious when Bashmilah admitted he had visited Afghanistan in 2000. Bashmilah was taken into custody by Jordanian authorities on Oct. 21, 2003. He would not reappear again until he stepped out of a CIA plane in Yemen on May 5, 2005.

Bashmilah's apparent innocence was clearly lost on officials with Jordan's General Intelligence Department. After his arrest, the Jordanians brutally beat him, peppering him with questions about al-Qaida. He was forced to jog around in a yard until he collapsed. Officers hung him upside down with a leather strap and his hands tied. They beat the soles of his feet and his sides. They threatened to electrocute him with wires. The told him they would rape his wife and mother.

It was too much. Bashmilah signed a confession multiple pages long, but he was disoriented and afraid even to read it. "I felt sure it included things I did not say," he wrote in his declaration to the court delivered Friday. "I was willing to sign a hundred sheets so long as they would end the interrogation."

Bashmilah was turned over to the CIA in the early morning hours of Oct. 26, 2003. Jordanian officials delivered him to a "tall, heavy-set, balding white man wearing civilian clothes and dark sunglasses with small round lenses," he wrote in his declaration. He had no idea who his new captors were, or that he was about to begin 19 months of hell, in the custody of the U.S. government. And while he was seldom beaten physically while in U.S. custody, he describes a regime of imprisonment designed to inflict extreme psychological anguish.

I asked Bashmilah which was worse: the physical beatings at the hands of the Jordanians, or the psychological abuse he faced from the CIA. "I consider that psychological torture I endured was worse than the physical torture," he responded. He called his imprisonment by the CIA "almost like being inside a tomb."

"Whenever I saw a fly in my cell, I was filled with joy," he said. "Although I would wish for it to slip from under the door so it would not be imprisoned itself."

After a short car ride to a building at the airport, Bashmilah's clothes were cut off by black-clad, masked guards wearing surgical gloves. He was beaten. One guard stuck his finger in Bashmilah's anus. He was dressed in a diaper, blue shirt and pants. Blindfolded and wearing earmuffs, he was then chained and hooded and strapped to a gurney in an airplane.

Flight records show Bashmilah was flown to Kabul. (Records show the plane originally departed from Washington, before first stopping in Prague and Bucharest.) After landing, he was forced to lie down in a bumpy jeep for 15 minutes and led into a building. The blindfold was removed, and Bashmilah was examined by an American doctor.

He was then placed in a windowless, freezing-cold cell, roughly 6.5 feet by 10 feet. There was a foam mattress, one blanket, and a bucket for a toilet that was emptied once a day. A bare light bulb stayed on constantly. A camera was mounted above a solid metal door. For the first month, loud rap and Arabic music was piped into his cell, 24 hours a day, through a hole opposite the door. His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake.

Cells were lined up next to each other with spaces in between. Higher above the low ceilings of the cells appeared to be another ceiling, as if the prison were inside an airplane hanger.

After three months the routine became unbearable. Bashmilah unsuccessfully tried to hang himself with his blanket and slashed his wrists. He slammed his head against the wall in an effort to lose consciousness. He was held in three separate but similar cells during his detention in Kabul. At one point, the cell across from him was being used for interrogations. "While I myself was not beaten in the torture and interrogation room, after a while I began to hear the screams of detainees being tortured there," he wrote.

While he was not beaten, Bashmilah was frequently interrogated. "During the entire period of my detention there, I was held in solitary confinement and saw no one other than my guards, interrogators and other prison personnel," he wrote in his declaration. One interrogator accused him of being involved in sending letters to a contact in England, though Bashmilah says he doesn't know anybody in that country. At other times he was shown pictures of people he also says he did not know.

"This is a form of torture," he told me. "Especially when the person subjected to this has not done anything."

In his declaration, Bashmilah made it clear that most of the prison officials spoke English with American accents. "The interrogators also frequently referred to reports coming from Washington," he wrote.

After six months he was transferred, with no warning or explanation. On or around April 24, 2004, Bashmilah was pulled from his cell and placed in an interrogation room, where he was stripped naked. An American doctor with a disfigured hand examined him, jotting down distinctive marks on a paper diagram of the human body. Black-masked guards again put him in a diaper, cotton pants and shirt. He was blindfolded, shackled, hooded, forced to wear headphones, and stacked, lying down, in a jeep with other detainees. Then he remembers being forced up steps into a waiting airplane for a flight that lasted several hours, followed by several hours on the floor of a helicopter.

Upon landing, he was forced into a vehicle for a short ride. Then, Bashmilah took several steps into another secret prison – location unknown.

He was forced into a room and stripped naked again. Photos were taken of all sides of his body. He was surrounded by about 15 people. "All of them except for the person taking photographs were dressed in the kind of black masks that robbers wear to hide their faces," Bashmilah wrote in the declaration.

He was again examined by a doctor, who took notations on the diagram of the human body. (It was the same form from Afghanistan. Bashmilah saw his vaccination scar marked on the diagram.) The doctor looked in his eyes, ears, nose and throat. He was then thrown into a cold cell, left naked.

It was another tiny cell, new or refurbished with a stainless steel sink and toilet. Until clothes arrived several days later, Bashmilah huddled in a blanket. In this cell there were two video cameras, one mounted above the door and the other in a wall. Also above the door was a speaker. White noise, like static, was pumped in constantly, day and night. He spent the first month in handcuffs. In this cell his ankle was attached to a 110-link chain attached to a bolt on the floor.

The door had a small opening in the bottom through which food would appear: boiled rice, sliced meat and bread, triangles of cheese, boiled potato, slices of tomato and olives, served on a plastic plate.

Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. "I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me," Bashmilah wrote in his declaration.

He was interrogated more. Bashmilah recalls an interrogator showing him a lecture by an Islamic scholar playing on a laptop. The interrogator wanted to know if Bashmilah knew who the man was, but he did not. It was in this facility that Bashmilah slashed his wrists, then went on his hunger strike, only to be force-fed through a tube forced down his nose.

The CIA seems to have figured out that Bashmilah was not an al-Qaida operative sometime around September 2004, when he was moved to another, similar cell. But there was no more white noise. And while his ankles were shackled, he wasn't bolted to the floor with a chain. He was allowed to shower once a week. He was no longer interrogated and was mostly left alone.

Bashmilah was given a list of books he could read. About a month before he was released, he was given access to an exercise hall for 15 minutes a week. And he saw mental healthcare professionals. "The psychiatrists asked me to talk about why I was so despairing, interpreted my dreams, asked me how I was sleeping and whether I had an appetite, and offered medications such as tranquilizers."

On May 5, 2005, Bashmilah was cuffed, hooded and put on a plane to Yemen. Yemeni government documents say the flight lasted six or seven hours and confirm that he was transferred from the control of the U.S. government. He soon learned that his father had died in the fall of 2004, not knowing where his son had disappeared to, or even if he was alive.

At the end of my interview with Bashmilah, I asked him if there was anything in particular he wanted people to know. "I would like for the American people to know that Islam is not an enemy to other nations," he said. "The American people should have a voice for holding accountable people who have hurt innocent people," he added. "And when there is a transgression against the American people, it should not be addressed by another transgression."

Dave replied:

this really bothers me? what about danny pearl. i am sure he would rather be held still in 7 x 10 cells. i am sure all the 9/11 victims wouldn't mind being held either instead of murdered by cowards. oh wait, that was the bush administration killing all those people. 50 years from now, no one is going to care about these terrorists inhumane treatment except the 3 of you.

I replied:

a few things, you bring up danny pearl and the 9/11 victims as some sort of justification for this? this guy had nothing to do with that, but just because he's an arab muslim, that gives us justification to do what we did to him, even though he was clearly, clearly innocent? you accussed me before that appealing to relatives who fought in the previous wars was a fallacious argument when talking about my belief in the rights of the constitution (and you are correct, that would have been fallacious to use in my argument, but i was only using that to explain my intensity and motivation for feeling what i do, not as a premise or conclusion to my argument), but your appealing to these victims to justify this is just as fallacious. so just because he's not dead and these people are, that makes this whole rendition thing allright and allright that our government shattered the life of an innocent man? i think both of our appeals to emotion are fallacious and again, i dont' see how your examples justify this program.

you also say that '50 years from now, no one is going to care about these terrorists inhumane treatment except the 3 of you' and i highly, highly disagree with you about this. in 50 years, this is going to be a bigger black eye in american history than the internment camps of WW II are now. you really think that the history books are going to look back kindly on what might arguably be the worst possible administration in us history? and one of the main reasons for his horribleness being this rendition program? no, i think that history is going to have a harsh, harsh judgment for this adminstration and it's many anti-american policies, only one of which is this rendition program.

on a personal note, your lack of compassion for this gentlemen, compared with your enormous compassion for danny pearl and the 9/11 victims, really illustrates the hypocrisy of the version of 'christianity,' if i can even call it that, that you claim to practice. your compassion distinction above is totally contradictory to 2 main messages that i believe christianity is about.

jesus said 'love your enemies.' david, where is your compassion for this man? who isn't even your enemy, although you obviously think that he is, which is why you have no compassion for him in the first place. would jesus say something like 50 years from now nobody is going to care about this guy or this program. oh wait, i forgot, in your version of christianity, omnibenevolence means all-loving, but only to your specific denomination of christianity.

also, jesus whole agape love message was about breaking down barriers between people. that is why he scolded the priestly elite and hung out with the lower classes of society. he wanted to show people that god loved everybody, not just the pharisees or the saducees. do you really think that, with how jesus wanted to break down these barriers between people, that he would approve of this barrier you obviously have up between yourself and this man? do you honestly think he would approve of these rendition camps because were christians and there not?

please don't take this the wrong way, but i just have a really hard time understanding your christianity with some of the comments that you make and the lack of compassion you show at times. if this is the god that you worship, if this is the god that all christians worship, and if this is your version of christianity and you believe it is the correct version, then frankly, i'm awfully glad that i'm not a christian. in fact, listening to you talk david, makes me not want to be a christian at all, because the way you portray it, christianity is a religion where god only cares about a select group of people and sanctions death and torture to those who are not in his 'flock.' this sure isn't my god and if it is the true god, then that true god is not worthy of worship for the limited scope of his 'omni-benevolence.'

i don't know, i just think that your lack of compassion at times gives christ and christianity a bad name, regardless of our disagreement over the scope of the constitution or the morality of these rendition programs. but i guess the flaw is on my part, because i don't understand and don't accept your 'true' religion of christianity. maybe if i did and was one of the 'flock,' i'd see it your way, but since i'm not i don't. but thanks for sending me this article paul, it was very interesting.

My turn to take the book quiz!

2007-11-21T05:08:00.000-05:00

1. Hardcover or paperback, and why?

Paperback, because their more fragile that way and I hate dust covers but without dust covers, all books look the same, but paperbacks all look different and it's much more difficult to kill people with paperbacks than with hardcovers, I think people have done enough killing with and over books, way too much than it should have been, that's for sure.

2. If I were to own a book shop I would call it…

Outside the Cave

3. My favorite quote from a book (mention the title) is…

'The tao that can be told is not the eternal tao,
the tao that can be named is not the eternal name'

Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching

Another good one is this

'What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun'

the Teacher who was king over Israel in Jerusalem, Ecclesiastes

Another good one:

'And every soul shall be paid back fully what is has done, and Allah knows best what they do'

Muhammad, 'The Companies:70' Qu'ran

Also:

'Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against one of your people, but love your neigbor as yourself. I am the Lord'

Moses, Leviticus 19:18

4. The author (alive or deceased) I would love to have lunch with would be…

Nietzsche, to ask him if I'm right about him

5. If I was going to a deserted island and could only bring one book, except from the SAS survival guide, it would be…

World Scripture: A Comparative Anthology of Sacred Texts or The Complete Plato, these are the 2 most sacred books in the world to me

6. I would love someone to invent a bookish gadget that…

read the book to me in a soothing female voice while i was reading along with her

7. The smell of an old book reminds me of…

the archives at Staley Library where I used to work at Millikin Univ

8. If I could be the lead character in a book (mention the title), it would be…

people say i look live wolverine, he's been alive almost 150 years, he's indestructible, a killing machine, he gets the hottest chicks, and they get killed by creed so that he can get with other ones, if you think about it, the perfect arrangement

9. The most overestimated book of all times is…

any book somebody is ready to kill for

10. I hate it when a book…

falls apart and can't be repaired, i always hear taps in my mind when this happens

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Stop the Reduction

2007-11-06T04:58:00.000-05:00

while researching my response, i came to this website which was kinda interesting

http://biblia.com/jesusbible/john.htm

thought i would share it with you all, kinda a pentecostal interpretation of this gospel, but an interesting read because of it's numeric analysis

as far as the definition of christianity goes, i'll let ya'all argue that amongst yourselves. but i do think that one of the metaphysical soteriological criteria for whatever the true religion turns out to be, must somehow include this as a requirement

'the Lord is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength' - (who can tell me where that is in the book?)

with God being understood in a monistic or mono-panentheistic way. (panentheism means that all is in God, so this would logically entail the love your enemies commandment as well as pretty much all the other ones, at least i think it does). i guess the only question left is what description you assign to your definition of God? and this is where all the killing and fighting and arguing and writing and dialoging and sharing and all that stuff, both good and bad, comes in (depending upon your method of persuasion and conversion, which all of the above are forms of.)

but don't listen to me about this stuff, i'm always trying to reduce christianity to this one commandment. (does that make me jewish in a extremely non-robust sort of way?) i wrote a huge paper to that effect my super senior year, with a little Taiosm, Platonism, and Nietzscheanism thrown in for that added spice.

sorry to change the topic here as well, but i have a questions you don't have to answer it, but i am myself in a sharing mood, so here ya go.

This class with my religion professor, whose an expert in Buddhism (he meat with the damn vice-ambassador of japan last week), has really made me aware of how belief is primary over other religious elements in the Abrahamic religions, and how other things, like ritual and practice, are primary over belief in Eastern religions.

that's why in the 'west' you can never go to church or do anything specifically about your religion, but as long as you believe, you can legitimately call yourself a christian, but you can't be an islamic christian. but in the 'east', if you never practiced your faith or did rituals and all that other stuff, nobody would believe you are religious, because that stuff is primary over there over belief, and you can be a confucian buddhist.

i guess i dont' have a question really, but something to think about, especially as these things stand in relation to each other over here. so i guess catholicism is kinda more 'eastern' with it's stronger emphasis on practice and ritual than lots of brands of protestantism, but still western because correct belief is essential as well.

that's my two cents, and don't let me reduce your religion to some sort of general monotheistic moral maxim, which i'm starting to realize i am very inclined to do.

ps - good etiquette is seeing the differences in value judgments between people, recognize if you have a lower value about a specific thing than the other person does, and then to act so that your value for that thing matches your neighbors, regardless of it really does or not. i'm tired, goodnight

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Against the Cumulative Progression of the Self

2007-10-29T02:45:00.000-04:00

“We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.”
~Anais Nin

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More Mythology - Shamanism

2007-08-25T15:34:00.000-04:00

I just ran across this quote from that same Myth and Knowing Book I'm reading and I loved it, so here you go! Enjoy!

'Jonathan Ott certainly considers shamanism the first and truest religion: "Shamanic ecstasy is the real 'Old Time Religion,' of which modern churches are but pallid evocations. Shamanic, visionary ecstasy, the mysterium tremendum, the unio mystica, the eternally delightful experience of the universe as energy, is a sine qua non of religion, it is what religion is for! There is no need for faith, it is the ecstatic experience itself that gives one faith in the intrinsic unity and integrity of the universe, in ourselves as integral parts of the whole; that reveals to us the sublime majesty of our universe, and the fluctuant, scintillant, alchemical miracle that is quotidian consciouness"'.

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Kali Beheaded

2007-08-07T01:27:00.000-04:00

So I"m reading this book called 'Myth and Knowing: An Introduction to World Mythology'
and I'm reading the section under the Female Divine called Kali Beheaded and ran across this passage which I thought was so good that it needed repeated on my blog, so here it is, for all you monists out there. Enjoy!

'The diverse religions of India feature numerous gods and goddesses, but, as one of the earliest philosophical dialogues in the Upanishads suggests, all religious philosophies and all gods, if reduced to their fundamental meaning, are one. Indeed, if any single statement can be made summarizing the Vedic philosophy underlying Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, and Jain belief, it is that the appearance of distinctions among beings and things - that is, the appearance of mundane reality that comes to us through normal consciousness - is an illusion. For beneath all distinctions and appearances, there is a fundamental identity between subject ("I") and object ("other") that transcends our everyday experience of things. Indeed, all things are one from the perspective of the Absolute whether that all-encompassing truth of existence is named Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva - or, for that matter, Parvati, Lakshmi, Durga, or Kali.' - from page 154-155.

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Thoughts on the 'Right to Die with Dignity'

2007-07-01T23:01:00.000-04:00

Whenever I hear the phrases "right to die with dignity" and "quality of life" I think, uh oh. I know once again the A.B.s are having a conversation about me, without me. I watch the news shows, waiting for one Crip activist to have her say, one Gimp, whose wholeness is in question, to be given an opportunity to offer some real expert information. I wait through several incarnations.

The grand debaters bandy many precious words. They call on some of my personal fave raves like "freedom of choice" and "dignity". Who, they ask, could be against these things? Who, they ask, would deny these things to their fellow citizens? No one who believes in the great principles upon which this great democracy was founded, right?

Unh uh. I'm not buying it. As an aging, female Cripple who lives with pain and in poverty, I know too well the value society places on me. Every day I am assaulted by images that degrade me, that deem me a burden, a tragedy, that question the quality of my life and the worthiness of my existence. I live in a society that more and more forces me to fight for basic health care, that forces me to put the majority of my limited physical resources into securing my survival. I live in a society that in every way imaginable tells me I should not want to live. And now they want to offer me the dignity of having the right to choose to be put out of my misery by a licensed physician. At the risk of sounding paranoid, I suspect my best interests do not reside at the heart of this matter.

One of the things that disturbs me most deeply, besides my exclusion from the so-called debate regarding "assisted suicide", is the fact that rarely are the underlying values and assumptions fueling this quest ever examined or even questioned. The desire to establish a constitutional right to die is built upon a foundation of belief that the damaged/difficult and/or dying body is worthless, that the experiences of living with the damaged/difficult and/or dying body are undignified. Dignity. That word.

To me, what it all gets down to is bodily fluids. Okay, that's a tad flippant, but I really do think it's an important part of the story. Nature at its most unruly. Our very human essence is so damned undignified. And so uncontrollable. We spend most of our life working like fiends to maintain the illusion that we are in control, that we can tame and tidy nature. Let's face it: nature always has the last laugh. Nowhere does the old girl laugh louder than with disability and death.

God forbid we human beings should ever have to get up close and personal with our unwieldy, messy, smelly humanness. In every way possible, this culture's rules and values distance us from the realities of our own bodies in all their glorious imperfection. Just flick on the TV any time of the day or night and you'll be bombarded with messages about the necessity of looking perfect and smelling better. It's presented not as an option, but an obligation. Of course we want to hasten death; of course we want to make it easier for Cripples to die. Out damn spot. Out.

I don't think it's just coincidence that this urgent, zealous drive to give us more ways to opt out of life comes at a time when more and more of us are visible, living in community, being "in the face", so to speak, of able-bodied assumptions about normal. And not just the us that can almost pass as AB, but those of us whose bodies are wildly uncontrollable, we of the drooling, spazzing, claw-handed variety of Cripple. And instead of trying to fade into the nooks and crannies as good Cripples of the past were taught to do, we blast down the main streets in full view, we sit slobbering at the table of your favorite restaurant, we insist on sharing your classroom, your workplace, your theater, your everything. The comfort of keeping us out of sight and out of mind behind institutional walls is being taken away. And because there is no way for good people to admit just how bloody uncomfortable they are with us, they distance themselves from their fears by devising new ways to erase us from the human landscape, all the while deluding themselves that it is for our benefit.

And of course these fears that fuel the right-to-die movement are fed by economics. The high cost of Cripple maintenance and slow death. Limited resources and yada yada. Limited resources? As a society, we seem to have no problem paying for what we want; there are no limited resources when it comes to those things we deem of value. Unfortunately, our society's priorities are out of whack. America belches out billions for stealth bombers and rations health care; America pours its financial resources down the drain of bigger prisons while cutting hot lunch programs for hungry children. We shouldn't be surprised that we're on the hit list. All in keeping with the good ole American love affair with the quick fix. So much easier to kill something than to care for it.

As someone who's spent most of my life on the receiving end of one kind of medical treatment or another, who's been probed and pried by more doctors than I can count, I can say from sad experience that when it comes to disability the medical profession ain't got a clue. Doctors are the last folks, as a group, I think oughta have more power to do me harm. It's not that I think docs are, by nature, a particularly vicious breed; it's just their training. What should we expect from folks who are taught that to heal means to fix or eradicate? If you can't cure it, bury it. Chronic illness, disability, the slow train of dying just don't make for a comfortable fit.

My wariness about granting doctors more power over life and death isn't just because of the raw deal I've had personally. I know history. The 200,000+ disabled people killed in Germany as prologue to the Holocaust weren't slaughtered by goose-stepping brownshirts. Unh uh. They were starved to death and lethally injected out of their misery by nice professional men in clean white coats, men who'd sworn to uphold the Hippocratic oath, that same oath about healing that the doctors pushing for assisted suicide in 1997 USA have sworn to uphold. Even with the glaring spotlight of historical perspective, the murder of our ancestors is held separate and unequal to the murder of the six million that followed. Not one of those doctors has been called a war criminal. We were and still are, after all "special circumstances."

If only Americans weren't so confident "it couldn't happen here," maybe we'd be safer. There are few things more dangerous than the arrogance of assuming you're incapable of behaving inhumanely. Decent people don't commit inhumane acts in good conscience, so in order to maintain the myth of enlightenment, those acts must be recast in a positive light. Dropping the H-bomb on the civilian population of Hiroshima moves from atrocity to "life-saving necessity"; killing those we deem a burden becomes euthansia, mercy killing, the relieving of undue suffering.

I have to admit I feel inadequate to express in a rational, reasoned way what I understand in the deepest cell of my marrow to be a movement toward genocide. But no matter how awkward or inarticulate we feel, no matter how difficult it is to peel away the layers to get deep inside the truth of this movement, we must do it. It is our obligation as the ancestors of this country's future victims of the right to die.

Copyright 1997 by Cheryl Marie Wade. Cheryl Marie Wade is an activist and award-winning writer-performer. Her videos include Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back, Self-Advocacy: Freedom, Equality and Justice for All and Here: A Poetry Perfomance. You can contact her at 1613 Fifth Street, Berkeley, CA 94710-1714 or send email to: GnarlyBone@aol.com

Marie responded:

This article really angered me, as you will be able to tell. The words I use aren't my normal choice of words, such as cripple. I used them because she used them.

I think this lady is smoking the cripple crack pipe. Here’s why:

There are several reasons a person may want assisted suicide, and I don’t think any of them involve someone else offing cripples cause they are cripple. There are 4 basic categories I would like to discuss; Body, No Mind; No Body, No Mind; Mind, No Body-Normal; and Mind, No-Body-Special Circumstance.

Body, No Mind: This would refer to persons that are basically living vegetables due to an accident, a health issue or trauma at birth. I work with this type of person on a daily basis in my line of work. Realistically, if these people had been like this in the womb, the mother’s body would probably have naturally aborted them. But in most cases, it happened during or after birth. If a person ended up with brain damage but his/her body is still functioning, do you assist them in suicide? Of course not! That would be murder, especially since they can’t give consent due to their cognitive lever. Granted their quality of life really isn’t much in my own opinion. But then again I don’t know what someone with severe or profound retardation thinks.

No Body, No Mind: This again is basically a living vegetable, but this time they have some sort of machine keeping them alive. Do we assist them in suicide? I would say it depends. If they hadn’t set up a precedence for how they would choose to live if such a thing were to happen to them, bluntly, they should get to live. However, my grandparents have signed the legal papers (Power of Attorney or something) that say if they are ever in the position where the only thing keeping them alive is some sort of machine, they want the plug to be pulled. They don’t think their quality of life would be good if they didn’t have a mind and a body to function with. But still in this case it isn’t someone else trying to pull the plug from a cripple. My grandparents have specified that this is what they want while they have their “right minds.”

Here Madame Cheryl Marie this isn’t someone having a conversation “about you, without you.” First of all, her body may be failing, but she’s still got her mind. In both of the above situations, the people don’t have their minds. Not all cripples (for even if your organs are functioning in the “Body, No Mind” example, if you don’t have your mind to control your muscles, your really are still cripple) fall into her category. Is she speaking for all cripples? If she is, that’s a pretty big mouth then. Maybe she’s trying to bite off a little more than she can or should chew.

Ok, then let’s talk about what in my eyes is her category-

Mind, No Body-Normal: This is for the Madame Cheryl Marie’s, the Chris Reeves’, the Stephen Hawking’s. These people have limited or no function of their bodies, but their minds are intact. They seek out help from others to get their “activities of daily living” (or ADL’s as we call it in my job) done and don’t mind having to rely on others to get into the shower, feed them, wipe their asses, etc… They have a positive outlook on life and want to live, in pain or without pain. They have a good quality of life because of their good perception of their life. I also work with people like this in my line of work. One of the people I work for is very smart, but has only control of moving her head. Yep, she “drools.” Yep, she “spazzes”. Yep, she goes to restaurants. “And because there is no way for good people to admit just how bloody uncomfortable they are with us, they distance themselves from their fears by devising new ways to erase us from the human landscape, all the while deluding themselves that it is for our benefit.” Really? Who the hell does that? Am I or anyone else trying to kick people with physical handicaps off the planet? As much as this women thinks that us “good people” are discriminating against her, I think she is way underestimating how much she is prejudiced against us.

I believe this is just another case of a super sensitive cripple. When I had a paper route in jr. high, I delivered to a lady in a wheelchair. Once while I was dropping of her paper she was getting her mail and dropped all of it on the front porch. When I bent down to help her pick it up she barked at me, “I CAN GET IT MYSELF.” I thought what a crippled bitch. If a fully able bodied (I assume that what the AB stood for in the article) person had just dropped his/her mail I still would have bent down to help them. I wasn’t helping her because she was in a wheelchair, I was helping because that’s what “good people” do. And even if I was helping her because she was in a wheelchair, so what? Sometimes there are special circumstances that a person will give a little extra effort to help. If I am standing at a door and someone with a stroller, on crutches, in a wheelchair is approaching the door, I’ll stand there and hold it open for them. Do I do it because I think that they can’t do it by themselves? No, they probably could, it would just be a struggle and take them longer. So to be helpful, I’ll hold it open for them. Most people will thank you for your help, not be a bitch. I just wish that if these super sensitive people don’t want be discriminated against, don’t view everything as discrimination.

I’ll get off that soapbox now and get back onto the assisted suicide soapbox for the last category-

Mind, No-Body-Special Circumstance: This is for the dude in the Metallica ‘One’ video, the Acushla’s in Million Dollar Baby. People like ‘Miss Florence Nightingale’ that have their minds but no bodies, but unlike her, do not want to live. This is, I believe, at the heart of assisted suicide. Here’s truly where the “dying with dignity” comes into play. “Darkness imprisoning me. All that I see absolute horror. I cannot live, I cannot die. Trapped in myself, body my holding cell. Landmine has taken my sight, taken my speech, taken my hearing, taken my arms, taken my legs, taken my soul. Left me with life in hell.” The only thing the landmine didn’t take was his mind. Does this sound like a guy that wants to live? Now, Miss Helen Keller, are you speaking for/about someone else, without someone else? Do you think that he is looking at the “value[s] society places on” him? Is he saying society think that his life is hell? No. He thinks that his life is hell. He just wants peace. ‘Miss Anne Frank’ talks about what discrimination is like for people with disabilities and their rights. Are we not taking persons rights away to kill themselves by not caring out their wishes if they want to die? It’s not like they can kill themselves if they have no arms to kill themselves – “I cannot live, I cannot die.” Acushla tried to bit off her own tongue. Is that dying with dignity?

I don’t believe these types of suffering people have anything to do with “coincidence[s] that this urgent, zealous drive to give us more ways to opt out of life comes at a time when more and more of us are visible, living in community, being "in the face", so to speak, of able-bodied assumptions about normal.” How dare she try to speak for all disabled people. How dare she compare herself to people like Acushla. How dare she try to place her values of persons with “normal” disabilities on all persons with disabilities!

The Hippocratic oath is all about “first do no harm.” In my opinion, if a person is in such agony as the person is above, doing the harm is allowing him to suffer in his own hell. She says herself, “Decent people don't commit inhumane acts in good conscience, so in order to maintain the myth of enlightenment, those acts must be recast in a positive light.” I guess that depend on the definition of “inhumane.” We would consider it inhumane to let a dog or horse go on living in extreme pain. The animal would be euthanized. But she would consider that inhumane for a person with a choice???

Wikipedia states ‘euthanasia’ is from the Greek meaning “good death” and is defined as “the practice of terminating the life of a person or animal in a painless or minimally painful way in order to prevent suffering or other undesired conditions in life.” Cheryl Marie, I’m happy that you aren’t suffering or have undesired conditions in your life. That’s great. But for those that are suffering and have undesired conditions, you shouldn’t speak on their behalf and act as if you understand them because you clump your disability in with theirs. You can have your form of a good death, and they should be allowed to have their form of a good death.

(And don’t even get me started on Germany. Did she really say that “the murder of our ancestors is held separate and unequal to the murder of the six million that followed”????? Did she just say killing people with disabilities was worse than killing people without disabilities? Wow.)

Dave said:

I have never been able to see the offense in symantics or hate speech. My philosophy is "consider the source". If someone is an ignorant a-hole who is just spewing evidence of why he is a blockbuster video clerk, then just leave it at that. If someone is a vile evil

soul, then consider their reason for spewing the vile, trying to exorcise their demons by being hateful. Either way, I would never give credence to some jack ass' insulting words. I am not saying this is the case here because i don't know you, but there is that notorious group in society who is offended for the sake of being offended. They are entranced on seeking personal salvation via martyrdom.

Marie responded:

Heyyyy! I used to be a Blockbuster video clerk!!! LOL!

I see your point, however, you could say the same thing to the person who wrote the article as well. But, most people wouldn't refer to this disabled person as an "a-hole" because she is disabled. They would "consider the source" and because this source is disabled, people may give her credence to what she is saying. This is kinda my point. However, just because she is disabled, she is trying to speak on behalf of all people that are disabled, and really on behalf of all the "good people" that don't have a disability. It didn't really offend me, just made me mad.

Sara said:

I agree with you more than with her, but i can see some of her point. and the reason she said the killing of the people with disabilities was different than killing the rest during the war (and she is by far not the first to say it) isn't because they think their lives are more valuable, but because they feel like the world treated these killings with less anger than the rest. like people thought in their own way that killing the crippled people wasn’t as bad as killing the able bodied people.

by the way, in your diatribe you left off one kind of assisted suicide person. whole body, whole mind but dying and unable to pull the trigger without help because of lack of courage. there are people who are perfectly capable of committing suicide themselves because the reason they want to is because they have been told they have some terminal illness but it has not yet (and maybe won't) debilitate them to the extent they couldn’t kill themselves. but these people can’t quite bring themselves to kill themselves so they ask for help.

Marie responded:

I originally had the 5th category of Body, Mind and was going to say all the things that you just wrote, but I was tired, so I made it back to 4. Thanks for doing it for me! Plus with my grandparents example when they were able bodied and in their right minds I kinda did cover it, sorta. These people could also be thinking about their "messy human" qualities or whatever Madame called it. Maybe they don't want others to have to deal with their human messiness. Don't want to have others have to wipe their ass. Know what kind of suffering is in store for them, and for their family member and friends to see them go through. Maybe they don't want to have to go through that or have other see them go through that. Messy is still messy.

And Germany at the time was Germany. Bad was bad. Mistreatment is still mistreatment for all peoples.

Sara responded:

i agree with you on the first part, and i agree with you on the second. but in reality, people who are upset about the killings of disabled people are upset about it being done but thats not really what they are talking about. what they are talking about is the reaction to it afterwards and even now.

Charles and Original Sin

2007-06-05T15:06:00.001-04:00

I asked Charles about original sin in an email, our conversation is recorded below

I wrote:

>also, i was perusing the scriptures and came to my favorite book,
>ecclesiastes, and found this
>
>Ecclesiastes 8:29 'This only have I found: God made mankind upright,
>but men have gone in search of many schemes.'
>
>and my question is how in the world does this teaching not conflict
>with the christian doctrine of original sin? i remember we talked
>about this before and know i think i have scritural support for my
>argument. i'd like to hear how a calvinist would respond.

He responsed:

Original sin has to do not so much with the first sin as it is the effects of thereof. It is not the first recorded sin, but the state of mankind thereafter. The Westminster Catechism defines sin as any want of conformity to the law of God. The first sin recorded in the Bible is in Genesis chapter 3. This chapter, historically, has been known as the chapter dealing with fall of man. In the preceding chapter, God enjoins Adam from eating from a particular tree; namely, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the following chapter, particularly verse 6, Adams, ostensibly, does partake of it. Now, to be absolutely forthright, many in orthodox circles are divided in regards to the actual sin, for and from which all of humanity has and is currently suffering. Consider, for example, three views:

One view holds that the sin resulting in and leading to original sin is that Adam partook of the apple.
A second view maintains that the sin leading to the state of original sin is that Adam, as the head of his family, did not protect Eve from the wiles of the serpent.
And still another view suggests that Adam first sinned by wanting to eat from the forbidden tree before he actually carried out that desire. Thus, the evil desire was the first sin.

There are also sundry views about original sin; that is to say, exactly in what way and under what grounds is sin transmitted. Here are the three prevailing ones:

The pre-existent view suggests that every human being who has or ever will live did live with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and, along with Adam and Eve, ate the fruit from the forbidden tree. To be sure, all humans are responsible for the sin that Adam committed in the garden, because all humans literally ate of the fruit from the forbidden tree.
The mediate imputation view suggests that God transferred Adam’s fallen (sinful) nature, not his guilt, to his progeny. Each man receives this fallen nature and from that each person sins, and thereby, incurs a moral debt, for which he cannot atone.
The immediate imputation view argues that the judicial ground on which Adam’s progeny is condemned is the guilt of Adam’s sin. This view is rooted in the idea of a covenant. There are three components to a covenant: parties, condition, and promise. In this covenant, sometimes called the covenant of works, God and Adam are the parties. The condition of the covenant is obedience to God. The promise of the covenant is negatively recorded in the Bible: “in the day that you eat of it [the fruit from the forbidden tree] you shall surely die”(Genesis 2:17); which can also mean this: if you eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree, then you will die. By way of Modus Tollens, the following can be inferred: if you do not die, then you did not eat. Thus, proponents of this view are persuaded that the promise was one of eternal life. Now, while God made a covenant with Adam, Adam was functioning as a representative for his progeny. Adam, in theology, is sometimes referred to as a representative or a federal head. As such, the consequences of his behavior would not apply to him but to all his descendants. Thus when Adam fell (sinned), the whole race, in a legal sense, fell with him, and is thereby condemned. (It should also be noted that this notion of representation is the ground on which those who trust in Christ eschew from God’s wrath. Christ, as the second Adam, it is said, did not inherit Adam’s sinful nature and through his active obedience in accomplishing what Adam failed to do functions as a representative for those who are in Him; that is, those whom He represents. Therefore, all of humanity is said to have one of the two representatives: Adam or Christ)

When the above account is placed in the foreground of your question, it, I think, perhaps illumines some of the obfuscating elements. For if one were to adopt the immediate imputation view regarding original sin, then Ecclesiastes 7:29 would seem to jibe with this understanding of original sin. That is to say, the first part of the verse indicates that God made mankind (The New King James version renders the word “man”) upright. This is consistent with not only the function of Adam but the very meaning of his name. The word Adam denotatively means man or mankind. The second part of the verse indicates that they have sought out many schemes. I have to admit that I did not consult any commentaries, so as to gain a better understanding of in reference to what this part may be, thus I do not pretend to know exactly what is meant by this. However, it seems fair to admit that this second half is at least consistent with the immediate imputation account, for this could be suggesting that mankind, as a result of falling in Adam, have sought out many schemes.

I responded:

After thinking about it for a long while, I do think that the verse is not logically inconsistent with the views of original sin, as understood in some of the examples of it you gave, what I guess I have a problem with is the inference from Adam's sin the in Garden of Eden to a 'fallen nature' of all of humanity, which, taken your definition of sin, means that all humans are created not to conform to the law of God. I think that this is false and that humans are neutral or maybe even good in their nature, I lean more towards the latter. I guess that's the issue that I'm really trying to get at. I think God made mankind upright and he continues to make them upright and I think the inference from Adam's sin to a 'flawed nature' of all of humanity is not warranted or even Biblical. Doesn't that inference go against the idea in the Bible that the sins of the father will not be passed on to the sins of the sons, on any of your interpretations of original sin? But the sin of Adam was passed onto me by means of my original state of disobedience to the law of God, or original sin? I guess I'm wondering now how the idea idea of original sin is consistent (or not) with the idea of non-transferrable responsibility found in the Old Testament?

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The Value of Possible Universes

2007-06-04T01:25:00.000-04:00

I wanted to see if anybody else had any thoughts about this topic. I did my paper for Phil of Religion on this and it's something I've always wondered about ever since I was little. It's from page 237 and 263 of Quentin and Craig's book Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. I copied this directly from my paper...

For a brief moment during the debate as to whether God’s omni-benevolence constrains It to create animate universes over inanimate universes, both Smith and Craig appeal to differing intuitions regarding the value of animate vs. inanimate universes. Thus, while Smith claims that ‘we must take into account not only that an inanimate universe is better than no universe but also that an animate universe is better than an inanimate universe,’ Craig disagrees with this claim when he states that ‘we can imagine innumerable many worlds of the former [inanimate] type which would exceed in goodness worlds of the latter [animate] type (for example, inanimate worlds of great beauty compared with animate worlds filled with unredeemed and gratuitous evil).’

I defended two theses in the paper, the first was that the worst possible existence or universe is better than non-existence or no universe, and the second was that the worst possible animate existence or universe is better than the best possible inanimate existence or universe. So I disagreed with Craig on the value of possible universes, but I did agree with him that God is not constrained to create animate over inanimate universes, even though I think that animate universes are a better kind of universe than inanimate ones, but that is a blog post for another time. I just want to know what you guys think about my two theses, about the value of these possible universes or non-universe against each other. I am more than intrigued to hear any and all responses!

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Subjective Objectivism

2007-05-31T23:40:00.001-04:00

So I"m reading Morals by Agreement by David Gauthier and I ran across this passage, which is pretty much what I believe, which I think was the fourth thing I realized that night, I guess I should say revealed to me that night, so I thought I would share it with all of u! Enjoy!

'The view that each individual is a member of some natural kind, and that each kind has its own characteristic perfection, quite different from that of other natural kinds, is, if not widespread in secular ethics today, yet of great historical importance. But this view has rarely, if ever, embraced a relative conception of value. For the objectivity of each characteristic perfection, its role as a norm or standard against which each individual member of the kind may be judged, has been supposed to depend on considering each perfection to be a manifestation, appropriate to its particular circumstances, of a single universal good. The seemingly relative goods of the several kinds are really facets of absolute good.'

in it's infinite variety and perfect singular unity paradoxically and for eternity<-that was me :)

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Zhaneen's Personality Test Night

2007-05-15T12:35:00.001-04:00

Here's the results of the first one:

Jung Test Results

Extroverted (E) 53.57% Introverted (I) 46.43%
Intuitive (N) 65.63% Sensing (S) 34.38%
Feeling (F) 53.13% Thinking (T) 46.88%
Judging (J) 56.25% Perceiving (P) 43.75%

Your type is: ENFJ

ENFJ - "Persuader". Outstanding leader of groups. Can be aggressive at helping others to be the best that they can be. 2.5% of total population.

And here's where to take it at.

Suppossidly, zhaneen says that this is what it means, great, just great! Every blessing is at the same time a curse! It's also below:

The Portrait of the Teacher Idealist (eNFj)

The Idealists called Teachers are abstract in their thought and speech, cooperative in their style of achieving goals, and directive and expressive in their interpersonal relations. Learning in the young has to be beckoned forth, teased out from its hiding place, or, as suggested by the word "education," it has to be "educed." by an individual with educative capabilities. Such a one is the eNFj, thus rightly called the educative mentor or Teacher for short. The Teacher is especially capable of educing or calling forth those inner potentials each learner possesses. Even as children the Teachers may attract a gathering of other children ready to follow their lead in play or work. And they lead without seeming to do so.

Teachers expect the very best of those around them, and this expectation, usually expressed as enthusiastic encouragement, motivates action in others and the desire to live up to their expectations. Teachers have the charming characteristic of taking for granted that their expectations will be met, their implicit commands obeyed, never doubting that people will want to do what they suggest. And, more often than not, people do, because this type has extraordinary charisma.

The Teachers are found in no more than 2 or 3 percent of the population. They like to have things settled and arranged. They prefer to plan both work and social engagements ahead of time and tend to be absolutely reliable in honoring these commitments. At the same time, Teachers are very much at home in complex situations which require the juggling of much data with little pre-planning. An experienced Teacher group leader can dream up, effortlessly, and almost endlessly, activities for groups to engage in, and stimulating roles for members of the group to play. In some Teachers, inspired by the responsiveness of their students or followers, this can amount to genius which other types find hard to emulate. Such ability to preside without planning reminds us somewhat of an Provider, but the latter acts more as a master of ceremonies than as a leader of groups. Providers are natural hosts and hostesses, making sure that each guest is well looked after at social gatherings, or that the right things are expressed on traditional occasions, such as weddings, funerals, graduations, and the like. In much the same way, Teachers value harmonious human relations about all else, can handle people with charm and concern, and are usually popular wherever they are. But Teachers are not so much social as educational leaders, interested primarily in the personal growth and development of others, and less in attending to their social needs.

The Anthroposophical Problem

2007-05-14T03:25:00.000-04:00

Reading about Steiner and Anthroposophy and basically claim across the verificationist criteria that at some level is the basis of all science, especially during the time in which he lived, which corresponded right with the logical positivists in Europe

Anthroposophy, also called "spiritual science", is a spiritual philosophy based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner,^[1] which states that anyone who "conscientiously cultivates sense-free thinking" can attain experience of and insights into the spiritual world.^[2] Those who engage in "anthroposophical research" say that they seek to attain in its investigations of the spiritual world the precision and clarity of natural science's investigations of the physical world.^[2] Anthroposophy's claimed status as a science has been rejected by at least one philosopher of science on the basis of the difficulty or impossibility of duplicating its results. ^[3]

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