Monday, April 7, 2008
"Sheikh Osama Bin Laden is in good health"
"Sheikh Osama bin Laden is in good health," Zawahri, who is also a doctor, said in response to questions compiled by Islamist Web sites. "The ill-intentioned always try to circulate false reports about him being sick."
Zawahri, who, like Saudi-born bin Laden is believed to be hiding in Afghanistan or Pakistan, also denounced the United Nations and vowed to attack Jews both within and outside Israel.
"The United Nations is an enemy of Islam and Muslims," he said. "It has legalised the creation of the state of Israel and its seizure of Muslims' land ... it has legalised the crusader presence in Afghanistan ... and Iraq," he said in a 104-minute audio recording posted on the Internet.
He defended attacks on U.N. offices in an apparent reference to twin bomb attacks on U.N. buildings in Algiers which killed 41 people in December and the 2003 bombing of a U.N. building in Baghdad which killed 22.
Zawahri also called for attacks on Jews. "We promise our Muslim brothers that we will do our utmost to strike Jews in Israel and abroad with help and guidance from God."
Al Qaeda will turn to fight Israel after "winning" the war in Iraq against U.S.-led and government forces, he said, adding that the United states had begun to collapse.
"The myth of unipolar world is over. The (Sept. 11, 2001) strikes on New York and Washington are identifying marks of this collapse, but empires do not collapse in a minute and could take decades. The collapse of the Soviet Union is the closest example."
The Egyptian militant also reiterated al Qaeda calls to Muslims to topple Western-allied governments and to attack Western and Israeli interests in Muslim countries.
Porsche goes to court over congestion charge
Israel to hold 'routine' nationwide emergency drill
From CNN :
Israel's plan to test its nationwide emergency response this week "is only a drill" and has nothing to do with "exaggerated" reports of heightened tensions with Syria, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Sunday.
"I would like to make it unequivocally clear that this is a routine drill," Olmert said before the start of his weekly Cabinet meeting.
"The State of Israel is not intent on any violent confrontation in the north. On the contrary, we have said more than once that we have an interest in holding peace negotiations with Syria," he said. "They know exactly what our expectations are. I can also say that we know what their expectations are; if these conditions will bear fruit, then this is what we are intent on and nothing else."
The drill will include a minute and a half-long siren that will sound across Israel at 10 a.m. Tuesday (3 a.m. ET) except in the southern town of Sderot, a frequent target of rocket attacks launched by Palestinian militants in Gaza.
At the same time, Israeli television will show a message from the Israeli military as well as instructional videos on how to seek shelter during an alert. During that time, Israeli schools and government offices will practice entering protected spaces.
On Tuesday, the country will begin practicing its response to a variety of attacks, including rocket strikes and incidents involving chemical and biological agents.
Hopkins health site restores 'abortion' as search term
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has restored the word "abortion" as an acceptable search term on a reproductive health Web site that's funded by the government.
The restriction on searches about abortion drew criticism from some health advocates and librarians who called it censorship.
After learning that the word "abortion" was being ignored by the site's search engine, the dean of the Bloomberg school ordered it restored. Doctor Michael Klag says he'll be asking questions about why the decision was made to limit searches.
The site, known as POPLINE, is funded by the United States Agency for International Development.
~ source ~
Ghost of human rights advocacy past
To the Editor:
Richard N. Gardner, in ''Eleanor Roosevelt's Legacy: Human Rights'' (Op-Ed, Dec. 10), recounts the integral participation of Mrs. Roosevelt in drafting the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights on the 40th anniversary of the declaration's adoption. ''Mr. Reagan's Human Rights Conversion,'' an editorial the same day, congratulated the Administration for paying increasing attention to human rights in regard to United States foreign policy. Both pieces justly praised the declaration and its contribution to raising consciousness of human rights around the world.
What was missing was mention of the declaration's three companion documents: the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Civil and Political Covenant's Optional Protocol. Together with the declaration, these documents compose the United Nations International Bill of Human Rights. At the declaration's genesis, its drafters understood it to represent a very general view of the rights considered universal and fundamental. The delegates agreed that an additional document, detailing the expansive rights accorded by the declaration and supplying necessary legally binding language, must be composed to give the declaration teeth.
The drafting of this additional document began in 1951. Though only one covenant was originally intended, in 1952 the General Assembly decided to prepare two documents simultaneously - one on economic, social and cultural rights, and the other on civil and political rights. At the seventh and eighth sessions of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, during which much of the covenants was drafted, the United States was again formidably represented by Mrs. Roosevelt. After revision by the third committee of the General Assembly, the final drafts of the covenants and the optional protocol, with much of Mrs. Roosevelt's input intact, were approved by the General Assembly on Dec. 17, 1966.
These three documents, according to Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, ''require states that have ratified them to recognize and honor the widest range of human rights ever recorded in history.'' Yet, despite Mrs. Roosevelt's championing of the covenants, and despite the ratification of them by more than 90 countries (including Canada, Britain, France, West Germany and the Soviet Union), the United States has yet formally to sanction these essential human rights instruments.
Signed by President Carter in 1978, they have languished before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with several other signed yet unratified human rights documents: the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the American Convention on Human Rights.
Several arguments have been made against ratification, most involving unwarranted concerns over the sovereignty of states. As the Senate recently demonstrated with its long-overdue ratification of the Genocide Convention, however, universal human rights transcends such minor issues. The United States, by ratifying the entire International Bill of Human Rights and the additional documents now before the Senate, can continue the battle for human rights begun 40 years ago by Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Only then will the United States thus commit itself under international law to its mission of promoting throughout the world the improvement of the human condition.
THOMAS G. EHR Athens, Ga., Dec. 12, 1988
The writer is with the Dean Rusk Center at the University of Georgia School of Law.
Eugenics: Molloch's paring knife
Periodic economic recessions created further social unrest. Labor unions, civil rights groups, and the woman's suffrage movement pressed for greater equity. At the same time nativist and racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan pulled in the opposite direction. It was out of this cauldron of social upheaval that the American eugenics movement emerged. It promised prosperity and progress, not through strikes or ugly race riots, but through a new science that would combine advances in the field of genetics with the efficiency of the assembly line.
Eugenicists used a flawed and crude interpretation of Gregor Mendel's laws on heredity to argue that criminality, intelligence, and pauperism were passed down in families as simple dominant or recessive hereditary traits. Mainline eugenicists (those eugenicists who were explicitly preoccupied with issues of race), believed that some individuals and entire groups of people (such as Southern Europeans, Jews, Africans, and Latinos) were more predisposed to the "defective genes." Charles Davenport, a leader in American eugenics, argued for laws to control the spread of "inferior blood" into the general population. He told an international gathering of scholars "that the biological basis for such laws is doubtless an appreciation of the fact that negroes and other races carry traits that do not go well with our social organization."
Davenport's wishes were partly realized. Eugenic advocates convinced 30 state legislatures to pass involuntary sterilization laws that targeted "defective strains" within the general population, such as the blind, deaf, epileptic, feebleminded, and paupers. On the national level, eugenic supporters played a decisive role in the Congressional passage of the draconian Immigration and Restriction Act of 1924, which established blatantly racist quotas. President Calvin Coolidge embraced the eugenic assumptions behind the law when he declared, "America must be kept American. Biological laws show É that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races."
From Introduction to Eugenics :
In 1798, an English clergyman and economist named Thomas Robert Malthus published the Essay on the Principle of Population. The central idea of the book is that population increases exponentially and will therefore eventually outstrip food supply. If parents failed to limit the size of their families, then war or famine would kill off the excess. The idea has been remarkably resilient, although the specific predictions that Malthus made were wrong. Malthus argued that the island of Britain could not sustain a population of 20 million, but 150 years later the population was more than triple Malthus' ceiling.
Charles Darwin, the biologist, was immensely impressed by Malthus' ideas, and the Malthusian theories are embedded in Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection (The Origin of Species, 1859, and the Descent of Man, 1871). But after Darwin borrowed ideas from economics and inserted them into biology, his cousin reversed the process and discovered ideas in biology that could be applied to humans. This is one of the first tricks that amateur magicians learn, like "finding" a coin in a child's ear. The amazing thing about Galton's stunt is that it has fooled so many people for so long.
At least one contemporary understood what Galton was doing. Friedrich Engels, a collaborator with Karl Marx, was contemptuous of the way Malthus' ideas about economics were inserted into biology and then retrieved as gospel: "The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes' doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois doctrine of competition together with Malthus' theory of population. When this conjurer's trick has been performed ... the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this proceeding is so obvious that not a word need be said about it."
It is noteworthy that this ideology of arrogance proved to be appealing on the right (Galton), then the left (British Socialists), then the right (German National Socialists), then the left (American environmentalists), then the right (see The Bell Curve debate). Galton's work is still used today. He used statistical methods, including the now-famous "bell curve," to describe the distribution of intelligence within a population. He devised various methods for measuring intelligence, and concluded that Europeans are smarter than Africans, on average. And he suggested systematic studies of twins to distinguish the effects of heredity from the effects of environment.
Galton's work was carried on, especially at the University of London, where he endowed a Chair of Eugenics. According to eugenics scholar J. Philippe Rushton, Galton's work was carried on especially by: Karl Pearson and Charles Spearman, then by Cyril Burt, and in our time by Raymond Cattell, Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen. However, these academics were carrying on work that was built specifically on Galton's theories. The eugenics ideology spread far beyond this core of true believers.
[ ... ]
After World War II, the eugenics movement discovered (or invented) the population explosion, and whipped up global hysteria about it. From 1952 on, a major part of the eugenics movement was the population control movement. The population explosion made it possible for eugenics movement to continue its work more from the fit, less from the unfit with the same people to do the same things, but with a new public rationale.
The transformation from open eugenics to population planning is described well by Germaine Greer: "It now seems strange that men who had been conspicuous in the eugenics movement were able to move quite painlessly into the population establishment at the highest level, but if we reflect that the paymasters were the same Ford, Mellon, Du Pont, Standard Oil, Rockefeller and Shell are still the same, we can only assume that people like Kingsley Davis, Frank W. Notestein, C. C. Little, E. A. Ross, the Osborns Frederick and Fairfield, Philip M. Hauser, Alan Guttmacher and Sheldon Segal were being rewarded for past services." That is, the population control movement was the same money, the same leaders, the same activities with a new excuse.
One of the organizations that promoted eugenics under the new population rubric was the Population Council. It was founded in 1952 by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, and spent $173,621,654 in its first 25 years. That is not a bad budget for one of the organizations in a dead movement! Clearly, the people who think the eugenics movement died in the rubble in Berlin do not understand crypto-eugenics, genetics or population control!
The extent of the population control movement is hard to imagine, and harder to exaggerate. During the past 25 years, there have been approximately 1.5 billion surgical abortions globally. The United Nations Population Fund has sponsored three meetings bringing together the heads of state from most of the world to develop a global population strategy, in Bucharest in 1974, Mexico City in 1984, and in Cairo in 1994. No other global problem has been the occasion for meetings comparable to these three. The World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and governmental agencies from nearly all the industrialized nations have contributed billions of dollars to campaigns designed to decrease population growth.
The population control movement has not been noted for respect for human rights. In 1972, for example, essays by members of the American Eugenics Society appeared in Readings in Population. Kingsley Davis explained the need for genetic control, and examined the obstacles, including a widespread attachment to the ideal of family life. But he saw some hope of developing a more effective program of improving the human race, although improvement would be slow:
"Under the circumstances, we shall probably struggle along with small measures at a time, with the remote possibility that these may eventually evolve into a genetic control system. ... The morality of specific techniques of applied genetics artificial insemination, selective sterilization, ovular transplantation, eugenic abortion, genetic record keeping, genetic testing will be thunderously debated in theological and Marxian terms dating from ages past. Possibly, within half a century or so, this may add up to a comprehensive program."
What he wanted, though was "the deliberate alteration of the species for sociological purposes," which would be "a more fateful step than any previously taken by mankind. ... When man has conquered his own biological evolution he will have laid the basis for conquering everything else. The universe will be his, at last."
In the same book, Philip M. Hauser, also a member of the American Eugenics Society, explained the difference between family planning, which relies on the voluntary decisions of individuals or couples, and population control, which would include abortion, a commitment to zero population growth, coercion, euthanasia and restrictions on international migration.
Perhaps the clearest example of the power of the eugenics movement today is in China, with its one-child-only family policy. This policy is an assault on prenatal life and on women's privacy, both. The program was described and praised in 16 articles in a remarkable issue of IPPF's quarterly journal, People, in 1989, on the eve of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. But this anti-life, anti-choice policy is not unique to China; most of the nations of Asia have some coercive elements in their population policies.
The coercive Chinese policy has a great deal of acceptance and support in the United States, including from feminist leaders like Eleanor Smeal and Molly Yard. When the Reagan administration cut off funds for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) because of its support for the Chinese population program, two American organizations sued to restore funds: Rockefeller's Population Council and the Population Institute in Washington. A 1978 survey of members of the Population Association of America found that 34 percent of members agreed that "coercive birth control programs should be initiated in at least some countries immediately."
In fact, the United States government is responsible for much of the global population control. In 1976, a formal definition of national security interests, NSSM 200, described the major threats to the United States. Some of these are obvious. The first, of course, was Communism in Europe, with the military charged with principal responsibility for defending American national security from this threat. In the Pacific, the threat was the possibility of losing bases; the military was charged with the principal responsibility for defending this national interest. In Latin America, there was the threat of incipient Communism; the CIA had principal responsibility for our defense. In Africa, according to the American government in 1976 and ever since, the threat to American national security interests is population growth. The Agency for International Development was given the responsibility of defending America from this grave threat. This document was classified until 1992; when it was de-classified, the Information project for Africa distributed it, and the covert depopulation policy tucked into the American foreign aid program caused a great deal of resentment.
From The Eugenics Survey in Vermont: Law & Public Policy :
Sexual Sterilization in Vermont
"The committee has recently received letters from the Governors of Vermont and Kentucky asking for information regarding legislation, and strongly endorsing the proposition that defectives, degenerates, and confirmed criminals should be sterilized. Both hope soon to secure legislation in their respective states legalizing the operation."
Report of the Committee of the Eugenics Section
of the American Breeders' Association to Study and Report
on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-plasm in the Human Population, 1912
"It appears that Vermont is fearful of the legal consequences of a compulsory human sterilization law in spite of legal precedents to the contrary. It expressly provides for voluntary sterilization only and hence is really a retrogressive step in light of the present status of the eugenic sterilization movement in the country."
Jacob Landman,
Human Sterilization in the United States, 1932
Vermont's history of eugenic sterilization predated the Eugenics Survey by at least twelve years and continued long after the Survey closed. Yet Harry Perkins attibuted the final passage of Vermont's sterilization law of 1931 to the Eugenics Survey's public education campaigns. The current law governing sexual sterilization of mentally retarded persons has been stripped of all eugenic intent and provides a detailed procedure to protect the rights of the individual.
Vermont records documenting the implementation of sterilization laws are not open to the public. The Eugenics Survey records do not contain sterilization records, as the Survey was not authorized to act as a "state eugenics board," as other states had established. Hence, our understanding of the degree to which "voluntary sterilization" of Vermonters was either "informed" or "consensual," as the law required, awaits access to patient records that are currently protected by privacy and confidentiality statutes. Government documents, manuscripts, and press coverage of the legislative debates over sterilization, however, dramatize the political landscape in which the sterilization bill was made law and document the central role the Eugenics Survey played in the campaign for sterilization.
Vermont's first sterilization bill, passed in 1912, was vetoed by the governor as unconstitutional.
Professor Harry Perkins renewed the quest for a eugenic sterilization law in 1925 at the first meeting of the Eugenics Survey advisory committee. Using legal precedents in other states and promotional literature from the American Eugenics Society to bolster their case, the Eugenics Survey and the Department of Public Welfare reconceived eugenic sterilization as part of a comprehensive state program of supervision and social control of mental deficiency.
In January,1927, Professor Perkins briefed the Vermont legislature on the need for a sterilization law using his Survey's studies Poor Vermont families (published as First Annual Report, Lessons from a Eugenical Survey of Vermont). The 1927 bill, "An Act Relating to Eugenic Sterilization," passed the Senate by a vote of 21 to 6, but failed in the House by a vote of 126 to 54. Perkins retreated from the sterilization issue in the next legislative session of 1929 in order to protect the Vermont Commission of Country Life from political controversy. In 1931, Professor Perkins, Dr. E. A. Stanley, Dr. Truman Allen, and Public Welfare Commissioner William Dyer reactivated the sterilization campaign, this time with the authority of the U. S. Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell. While based on the presumption that physicians could diagnose "hereditary feeblemindedness" or inherited mental illness, the 1931 campaign for a eugenic sterilization law was waged on economic and social grounds.
From Eugenics -- Breeding a Better Citizenry Through Science :
Thus, the first edition of Principles of Genetics can talk very casually about people whose stock ought to be eliminated on the basis of their contributions to society. The senior author, Edward Sinnott, became a professor at Columbia, and later, dean of the Yale Graduate School. The junior author, Leslie C. Dunn, also became a professor at Columbia, and became an outspoken critic of racist biology after the Nazis came to power. This passage (and the entire chapter it is from) does not appear in the editions that followed the stock market crash and the Depression, when it suddenly became clear to geneticists that wealth wasn't necessarily a good indicator of genotype.
Geneticists were slow to get it. Many, of course, believed it; they came from the privileged classes and shared the cultural prejudices of the era. Others may not have agreed with Madison Grant or Charles Davenport, but didn't disagree with them publicly. In fact, during the heyday of the eugenics movement, virtually every geneticist of note served below Grant and Davenport on the Advisory Board of the American Eugenics Society. One notable exception was Thomas Hunt Morgan, the great geneticist from Columbia University, who worked in the same building as anthropologist Franz Boas, a tireless critic of eugenics. Morgan published some polite reservations about eugenics in the mid-1920s, but not enough either to piss anyone off or to allow people to invoke his prestige to repudiate the movement. In the mid-1920s the only critics of eugenics were non-scientists or soft scientists, like Boas and Clarence Darrow, a great defender of civil liberties. Darrow evolved from biology's champion at the Scopes trial in 1925 to biology's basher in 1926.
The other exception was bacterial geneticist Herbert Spencer Jennings of Johns Hopkins. Jennings was asked to take a critical look at Harry Laughlin's data, presented to Congress, showing that there was a gradient in criminality when you looked at the country of origin of American immigrants, extending from northwest Europe to southeast Europe. Germans were law-abiding, and Italians were not. Jennings saw that Laughlin's analysis treated the Irish unfairly -- the data showed that they should have been with the Italians (not very law-abiding), but they weren't shown that way, ostensibly because they were tucked away in far northwestern Europe (from which people were supposed to be law-abiding), and showed the whole analysis to be bogus. And that is what Jennings said to Yale economist Irving Fisher, sitting President of the American Eugenics Society in 1925: Laughlin had simply mapped early versus later immigrants to America. The people coming in recently from southeast Europe were poor and therefore criminalistic, and the recent immigrant Irish proved it. Jennings quietly resigned from the AES Advisory Board.
His colleague Raymond Pearl, however, became the first biologist to take a public stand critical of eugenics. Pearl had long been a supporter of the field, but felt it was out of hand. In his friend H. L. Mencken's magazine, The American Mercury, Pearl published "The biology of superiority," the first biological critique of eugenics, which was sufficiently newsworthy as to make national headlines, and earned him the enmity of many biologists. That was 1927, after immigration restriction had already been passed, and Buck vs. Bell had been upheld by the Supreme Court.
When L. C. Dunn wrote a history of genetics in 1965, however, he gave the reader no discussion of the eugenics movement. Maybe he was right, for maybe geneticists had really learned the lessons of the eugenics era, and they could be safely put behind: that wisdom does not necessarily accompany technological achievement; that geneticists (like other citizens) carry the prejudices of their culture, class, and era; and that consequently their pronouncements about human issues should be very cautious.
On the other hand, maybe not. When the Human Genome Project is justified by James Watson on the grounds that genetics has replaced astrology in determining the course of our lives, we are obliged to think about the implications of such a blank check for the power of genetics. Of course, no one is arguing for the destruction of the poor on the grounds of their genes, but we hear free speculation about genes for crime, violence, and intelligence -- as if these were principally or even significantly genetic in origin, and thus amenable to gene therapy (which doesn't exist, of course) or the ever-present option of extirpation. History gives today's scientists a responsibility to keep their pronouncements conservative, and to debunk the misuses of genetics, whether by geneticists themselves or by others.
We hear a lot these days about how all citizens need to know genetics, and that science education must be a high priority. Indeed, that's true. But perhaps the opposite is even truer. Perhaps the highest priority should be educating scientists about the humanistic aspects of genetics.
Perhaps the most interesting paradox in the history of eugenics is that the American human genetics community, faced with the embarrassment of the Nazi enthusiasm for eugenics, set out to reinvent itself after World War II. It did so by burying its ancestor, Charles Davenport, and finding a new ancestor, Archibald Garrod, who had published some obscure work in medical genetics in the early part of the 20th century. Nobody in human genetics had cited his work for decades, but he was resurrected by L. C. Dunn, G. W. Beadle, and J. V. Neel in the 1950s, as they sought to legitimize the discredited field, and to reinvent it -- not as social theory any more, but as clinical practice. Then they redefined the term "eugenics", so that it no longer meant "eliminating the stock" -- and what that might imply -- of the poor and marginalized, but rather it now meant genetic screening for clinical syndromes and family counseling.
And it worked, for a while. There was one book on eugenics published in the 1960s (by Mark Haller) and one in the 1970s (by Kenneth Ludmerer). Modern scholarship on the subject, however, is directly descended from Daniel Kevles' (1985) book, serialized first in The New Yorker, at the time of the initial interest in the Human Genome Project.
Kansas City's 'Shadowy Anti-Fun Directorate'
Ren McCormack for City Council: I'd never heard of the Alcohol Beverage Advisory Group before, but doesn't it sound absolutely kick-ass? Unfortunately, its name is deceptive, just like the American Center for Wildlife Conservation Policy, a conservative think-tank advocating for anti-Mexican eugenics programs. It's all trickery. Ideally, the Alcohol Beverage Advisory Group would consist of Jimmy Buffett, Vince Vaughn, David Lee Roth and most of the people that I work with, including two Jen Chens.
However, the reality is that the board consists of "12 members of the community" and "the manager of Regulated Industries Division," otherwise known as the Division most likely to push for the adoption of race-based eugenics programs due to sheer sociopathic misanthropy.
[ ... ]
I think I heard that they made dancing illegal, too. Anyway. They're meeting to discuss the "proposed ordinance changes" by which they make the city's fun more grudgingly administered.
Globalization and Nationalism - The New Deal
Why, then, are there less than two hundred or so national states? When he was writing in 1983 there were well under two hundred U.N. representatives, and though this number has grown, forecasts for the later twenty-first century don't usually envisage more than something between two hundred and twenty or thirty new (and naturally mostly smaller) independent states.
Gellner's characteristic explanation of this disparity was in terms of overall social and cultural development. The culprit, he argued, had been first-round industrialization and urbanization. These were not processes planned by some celestial council from a suitably all-powerful centre, such as Beijing, Delhi, Rome, Madrid (or wherever). No, industrialization evolved chaotically, in fits and starts, out of the unlikely fringe location of the North Atlantic seaboard, and was marked throughout by chronic unevenness and widespread antagonism.
It was impossible for industries, larger-scale commerce, greater market-places and banks to develop at a small-town or region scale. Nor were they ever likely to be set up by the sprawling dynastic and military empires of antiquity, whose essential concern remained expansion, hierarchy and secure military dominance of an inherited rural world.
By contrast, Capitalism (as it would later be called, notably by Scots) was able to evolve only at an intermediate level, within societies smaller than the antique dynasties but much bigger than most ethno- linguistic groups. It demanded the formation of relatively large socio-economic spaces, to be viable.
Viability in that sense may never have been a fixed or unalterable condition. However, in retrospect we perceive that for over two centuries it did come to mean (as it were) 'something like France' or like England (in the familiar 'Anglo-British sense): not something like Brittany, Provence, Monaco, Wales or Ireland.
The Scots of course had already situated themselves within the bigger-is-better expansion, via the 1707 Treaty of Union. Their fate was to be the unusual one of successful 'self-colonization' in that world. That is, they avoided conquest or assimilation, and conserved a distinct civil society - but only by accepting (and in fact eagerly embracing and preaching) the broader rules of the new age, as laid down by France, England and other more viable polities.
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Globality is decreed in advance to possess one overall or commanding meaning: either Neo-liberal progress or some new universal oppression, choose your side. In fact, what globality may be ushering in is more like a range of conflicts, it may be too much to say 'battlefields' - but certainly terrains of decision, alternative directions and possibilities. Umberto Eco has identified one of these alternatives clearly, and amusingly, in his Putting the Clock Back.
Look at the world since the First Gulf War, he asks: just who is so plainly clinging to past patterns and habits? We see the explosion and spread of what he labels 'neo-war', the curse of US-led globalization. That is, of threatened and actual incursions against largely phantasmagoric enemies like 'Terrorism' and Islam or (on the other side) 'the West' and crusade-style Christianity or Evangelism.
The aim of these is to maintain and mobilize the mass public opinion upon which great (or would-be great) power élites still depend, against the individualism, privatization and indifference that accompany so many transnational blessings and successes. Societies have mutated far more than states. And this is why the latter find themselves tempted into another version of the 19th century Restoration that tried to impose stability, values (etc.) between Napoleon 1st and the 'Springtime of Nations' in 1848. Brown and Bush can't literally put the clock back, any more than Prince Metternich could; but at least they can try to slow it down a bit, with plausible aggression (ideally involving Mass Destruction threats), and of course the new forms of persuasion provided by the revolution in communications.
The guilty parties here are unmistakable: they are the old lags of Gellner's bigger-and-better epoch, plus new members and applicants to join the Body-builders Club - countries endowed with that favourite attribute of British Leaders, 'clout'. America First, naturally, but with Great Spain, Great Russia, Great Serbia alongside cheer-leader Great Britain, plus rising muscle-flexers like India, Indonesia, Iran and China.
At the same time as it tries to take over globalization, this great-at-all-costs club is busy acquiring its own academic credentials as well. That is, Professors who seriously believe that the globe is safer - more secure - with well-padded, first-round veterans in control. An astonishing volume entitled No More States? appeared last year from the stables of University College, Los Angeles, arguing not only that there should be no more of these small nuisances, but that possibly a reversal of thrust may be possible, in the sense of 'agglomerationism' - returns to one or other metropolitan fold by populations tempted astray by romantic delusion or bad verse.
In case anyone fears I'm making this up, let me quote from Professor Richard Rosecrance's summing up:
'Potentially dissident Scotland, the Basques, Quebec and other provincial populations have gradually come to see the federation-metropole as a less hostile environment, and their independence movements have declined in proportion...(hence) few new states are likely to be created...It is possible, even, that the number of fully independent states may decline as political units begin to merge with each other...' (5)
This conclusion had the good luck to be published not long before the 2007 elections in the U.K., and in that sense comment may be superfluous. But the general sense is unmistakable: global history must be frozen in its tracks, for the convenience of existing agglomerations, including the United States and loyal fan-club Great Britain.
[ ... ]
In a remarkable recent essay called simply 'Presence', the Dutch social historian Eelco Runia has made the point with a humorous metaphor. (9)
Globalization can't help meaning that we're all 'in the same boat'; but on this noble vessel, most of the occupants can't help being virtual 'stowaways', travelling either on fake documents and overdrawn credit-cards, or just secretly, smuggled or bribed aboard at night or in disguise. Now however, as the global process continue its erratic and ambiguous course, the rabble has begun appearing on deck, in broad daylight. And not just for the fresh air, or to admire the views.
No, they want their tickets. It's time they were recognized, and released from the dank lower levels of ballast, coiled ropes and awful stairwells. 'Equality' is the standard demand, accompanied naturally by demands for use of the cafeteria and lounges, spare beds and some formal presence by representation on the bridge. There used to be bigger-is-best techniques for avoiding this nuisance: alibis like 'federalism', 'devolution' - home rule for the steerage classes, as it were. Allow them enough folk-dancing and local government, that'lll keep them out of trouble.
But of course presence in Runia's sense represents none of these palliatives. The spirit of Gertrude Stein is turning out to be quite strong up on deck, something to do with the democratic air. On this bigger, final boat everyone is now aboard, 'self-government' is self-government is self-government. What Charles Stewart Parnell meant in the famous remark about nobody having 'a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation', in the sense of its will and sovereignty.
The motto prefixes the recent Scottish Government's 'National Conversation' on Scotland's future. In the new context this means not (or not necessarily) 'six or eight thousand' states corresponding to Gellner's sources of human diversity. But it does imply that no court of fixers should decide who is in or out, or what their relationships with one another should be.
In practice, though, it probably signifies at least something like the foreseeable figures I mentioned before - around two hundred and twenty or thirty sovereignties over this century and next. To an increasing degree these are likely to relate to one another via formulae of confederation, quite different from federalism, subsidiarity, devolved regionalism and other dodges of the bygone era. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are, like many other smaller entities around the globe, simply joining the queue to be heard on that wavelength.
[ ... ]
The counter to 'all-the-same-ism' can only be cross-fertilization, the societal equivalent of Darwin's new species and forms. That's what 'the universal' has always been, the capacity to transcend, to fuse, to breed hybrid novelty rather than merely 'agglomerate' in Professor Rosecrance's sense.
However, the power to do this rests at bottom upon more than the maintenance of diversity - it demands that differentiation be favoured, be positively fostered, by globalization. Globalization will have to perpetuate Babel, as well as confronting all its difficulties and contradictions.
At bottom, the reason is that human universals arise only via contrasts, by the transcendence of borders, via cross-fertilization, through hybrids and surprises, from the unheard-of, in communities not just 'imagined' in Ben Anderson's celebrated phrase, but previously unimaginable, from presences whose spell makes the past into a bearable future. ... "
Fluoride reconsidered
scientifically-valid evidence proving safety or effectiveness," says lawyer Paul Beeber, President, New York State Coalition Opposed to Fluoridation.
Fagin, award-wining environmental reporter and Director of New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, writes,
"There is no universally accepted optimal level for daily intake of fluoride." Some researchers even wonder whether the 1 mg/L added into drinking water is
too much, reports Fagin.
After 3 years of scrutinizing hundreds of studies, a National Research Council (NRC) committee "concluded that fluoride can subtly alter endocrine function,
especially in the thyroid -- the gland that produces hormones regulating growth and metabolism," reports Fagin.
Fagin quotes John Doull, professor emeritus of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Kansas Medical Center, who chaired the NRC committee thusly,
"The thyroid changes do worry me."
Fluoride in foods, beverages, medicines and dental products can result in fluoride over-consumption, visible in young children as dental fluorosis --
white spotted, yellow, brown and/or pitted teeth. We can't normally see fluoride's effects to the rest of the body.
Reports Fagin, "a series of epidemiological studies in China have associated high fluoride exposures with lower IQ."
Many states voted to require fluoridated water, but in a few states it is up to the local water company. Oregon Citizens for Safe Drinking Water is an example of one group which has actively opposed the fluoridation. They feel that the fluoride itself is bad enough for health, but its negative effects are multiplied because fluoride compounds are contaminated with lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and other toxins.
Not only that, but studies have shown that fluoride can pull lead from pipes and add that to the poisonous mix coming from our taps. That might be the reason fluoride also seems to bring copper and aluminum with it as well as the lead.
Animal studies have demonstrated evidence of fluoride's toxic effects on brain tissue. These include brain cell damage, reduced lipid content, impairment in anti-oxidant defense systems, increased aluminum uptake, and the formation of beta-amyloid plaques. These are the plaques which are indicative of Alzheimer's Disease. Maybe this explains why many dogs seem to prefer to drink from puddles than their own tap-filled water dishes.
Complicating the ability to control the level of fluoride is the presence in many rivers of "naturally occurring fluoride". It has been hard to find research on the source of such "natural" fluoride, but it possibly could come from the same source as the pharmaceuticals, or from fertilized soils along the stream banks.
Water fluoridation is an old-fashioned concept. It is dentistry's continued goal for every American's faucet to dispense 1 milligram fluoride via approximately one quart of water. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) tells us that 2/3 of Americans receive fluoridated tap water. Virtually 100% eat and drink a fluoridated food supply.
Fluoridation, shockingly, is not supported by valid science.
Dentists mistakenly believed swallowed fluoride created decay resistant teeth by becoming part of children's developing enamel; but they were wrong. Fluoride's beneficial effects, if any, are topical according to the CDC and the American Dental Association.
Public health officials predicted fluoride would eradicate tooth decay like vaccines prevent disease; but they were wrong about that, too. They said fluoride was a necessary nutrient and, like vitamin C prevents scurvy, fluoride would prevent tooth decay - wrong again.
The US Surgeon General reports tooth decay is at epidemic proportions among our poor and minority populations, many of whom live in fluoridated communities . While, tooth decay is increasing in US children , the United Kingdom reports an 11% cavity decline in a recent survey and a 15% decline in a previous survey. The UK is only 10% fluoridated and provides low-fluoride children's toothpaste. Only high-dose fluoride toothpaste is available in the U.S. - twice the dosage of the UK's children's fluoridated toothpates.
In fact, non-water-fluoridated Finland, Sweden and Holland cut tooth decay rates by 92%, 82% and 72% respectively over the past 20 years. While in the super-fluoride saturated U.S., public health dentists only managed to cut rates by 50% over the same period (since 1984).
Fluoride supplements are prescribed to children from communities that won't or can't fluoridate their water supply. With outdated and scientifically invalid scientific support, dentists say swallowing l milligram fluoride daily reduces tooth decay without fluoride's adverse effects such as dental fluorosis but they are even wrong about that.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) never approved fluoride ingestion. They were "grandfathered" in before the FDA drug testing laws were enacted. New research shows that children who consume fluoride tablets are more at risk for dental fluorosis. That's why routine fluoride supplementation is no longer recommended by the Canadian Dental Association, the Western Australian Health Authority's Dental Section and the German Scientific Dental Association. And, because of health concerns, Belgium banned the sale of fluoride supplements to prevent tooth decay.
Dental Fluorosis is the only outward sign of fluoride's toxicity to the rest of the body.
Astonishingly, research now shows swallowing fluoride is virtually useless and has unnecessarily exposed millions of Americans to fluoride's adverse side effects such as bone disease and dental fluorosis - white spotted, yellow or brown stained and sometimes pitted and crumbly teeth - which has, not so surprisingly, increased dramatically in American children.(above picture is moderate dental fluorosis).
The Acadeny of General Dentistry and many researchers recommends non-fluoridated water be used to prepare infant formula and foods, to avoid dental fluorosis.
November 2006, the American Dental Association quietly advised their members that fluoridated water mixed into concentrated infant formula increases the child's risk of dental fluorosis and should be avoided. Then the Centers for Disease Control put the same advisory on their website but didn't issue an alert or press release to inform the public...
The following letter was received by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee Wisconsin, on 2 October 1954, from a research chemist by the name of Charles Perkins. He writes:
"I have your letter of September 29 asking for further documentation regarding a statement made in my book, "The Truth about Water Fluoridation", to the effect that the idea of water fluoridation was brought to England from Russia by the Russian Communist Kreminoff. In the 1930's Hitler and the German Nazis envisioned a world to be dominated and controlled by a Nazi philosophy of pan-Germanism. The German chemists worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass-control which was submitted to and adopted by the German General Staff. This plan was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water supplies. By this method they could control the population in whole areas, reduce population by water medication that would produce sterility in women, and so on. In this scheme of mass-control, sodium fluoride occupied a prominent place.
"Repeated doses of infinitesimal amounts of fluoride will in time reduce an individual's power to resist domination, by slowly poisoning and narcotizing a certain area of the brain, thus making him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him. [A convenient and cost-effective light lobotomy? --- Ott].
"The real reason behind water fluoridation is not to benefit children's teeth. If this were the real reason there are many ways in which it could be done that are much easier, cheaper, and far more effective. The real purpose behind water fluoridation is to reduce the resistance of the masses to domination and control and loss of liberty."
"When the Nazis under Hitler decided to go to Poland, both the German General Staff and the Russian General Staff exchanged scientific and military ideas, plans, and personnel, and the scheme of mass control through water medication was seized upon by the Russian Communists because it fitted ideally into their plans to communize the world."
"I was told of this entire scheme by a German chemist who was an official of the great I.G. Farben chemical industries and was also prominent in the Nazi movement at the time. I say this with all the earnestness and sincerity of a scientist who has spent nearly 20 years' research into the chemistry, biochemistry, physiology and pathology of fluorine --- any person who drinks artificially fluorinated water for a period of one year or more will never again be the same person mentally or physically."
Signed: CHARLES E. PERKINS, Chemist, 2 October, 1954.
Another letter needs to be quoted at length as well to help corroborate Mr. Perkin's testimony. This letter was written by a brilliant (and objectively honest) scientist named Dr. E.H. Bronner. Dr. Bronner was a nephew of the great Albert Einstein, served time in a WWII prison camp and wrote the following letter printed in the Catholic Mirror, Springfield, MA, January 1952:
"It appears that the citizens of Massachusetts are among the 'next' on the agenda of the water poisoners.
"There is a sinister network of subversive agents, Godless intellectual parasites, working in our country today whose ramifications grow more extensive, more successful and more alarming each new year and whose true objective is to demoralize, paralyze and destroy our great Republic ---- from within if they can, according to their plan --- for their own possession."
"The tragic success they have already attained in their long siege to destroy the moral fiber of American life is now one of their most potent footholds towards their own ultimate victory over us."
"Fluoridation of our community water systems can well become their most subtle weapon for our sure physical and mental deterioration. As a research chemist of established standing, I built within the past 22 years 3 American chemical plants and licensed 6 of my 53 patents. Based on my years of practical experience in the health food and chemical field, let me warn: fluoridation of drinking water is criminal insanity, sure national suicide. DON'T DO IT!!"
"Even in very small quantities, sodium fluoride is a deadly poison to which no effective antidote has been found. Every exterminator knows that it is the most effective rat-killer. Sodium Fluoride is entirely different from organic calcium-fluoro-phosphate needed by our bodies and provided by nature, in God's great providence and love, to build and strengthen our bones and our teeth. This organic calcium-fluoro-phosphate, derived from proper foods, is an edible organic salt, insoluble in water and assimilable by the human body; whereas the non-organic sodium fluoride used in fluoridating water is instant poison to the body and fully water soluble. The body refuses to assimilate it."
"Careful, bonafide laboratory experimentation by conscientious, patriotic research chemists, and actual medical experience, have both revealed that instead of preserving or promoting 'dental health', fluoridated drinking water destroys teeth before adulthood and after, by the destructive mottling and other pathological conditions it actually causes in them, and also creates many other very grave pathological conditions in the internal organisms of bodies consuming it. How then can it be called a 'health plan'? What's behind it?"
"That any so-called 'Doctors' would persuade a civilized nation to add voluntarily a deadly poison to its drinking water systems is unbelievable. It is the height of criminal insanity!"
"No wonder Hitler and Stalin fully believed and agreed from 1939 to 1941 that, quoting from both Lenin's 'Last Will' and Hitler's Mein Kampf: "America we shall demoralize, divide, and destroy from within."
"Are our Civil Defense organizations and agencies awake to the perils of water poisoning by fluoridation? Its use has been recorded in other countries. Sodium Fluoride water solutions are the cheapest and most effective rat killers known to chemists: colorless, odorless, tasteless; no antidote, no remedy, no hope: Instant and complete extermination of rats."
"Fluoridation of water systems can be slow national suicide, or quick national liquidation. It is criminal insanity ------- treason!!"
Signed: Dr. E.H. Bronner, Research Chemist, Los Angeles
'1984: Grace Commission Report under Ronald Reagan showed IRS is a fraud that collects taxes for the Banking Dynasties'
"100% of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal Debt ... all
individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services
taxpayers expect from government."
-Grace Commission report submitted to President Ronald Reagan - January 15, 1984
Ronald Reagan was promptly shot after he dared to criticize the Fed, on the same day
that the Pope was shot. After recovering, he changed his mind and praised the Fed. About
seven US Presidents have been assassinated for not cooperating with the Transatlantic
Banking Dynasties (William Henry Harrison, poisoned, in 1841, Zachary Taylor, Lincoln,
Garfield, McKinley and John F. Kennedy 1963; 7 if FDR's poisoning is counted).
Most of us feel sick when we realize that Not one dime of IRS money goes to the US
Gov't, according to Reagan's Grace Commission: it all goes to pay interest on a bogus
debt to the Private Federal Reserve (FED), just to allow paper money to circulate as
"Federal Reserve Notes". The Federal Reserve is a private Corporation eventually owned
by the Rockefellers and Rothschilds Dynasties through intermediary agents, designed to
suck the capital dry from the U.S., as the Rothschilds do in Europe. Read Billions for
the <http://www.deepinfo.com/email/Billions4Bankers.htm> Bankers, Debts for the People
More Links at DeepInfo.com on Jekyll Island <http://www.deepinfo.com/more/jekyll.htm> .
The final report of the 1984 Grace Commission, convened under President Ronald Reagan,
quietly admitted that none of the funds they collect from federal income taxes goes to
pay for any federal government services. The Grace Commission found that those funds
were being used to pay for interest on the federal debt, and income transfer payments to
beneficiaries of entitlement programs like federal pension plans.
[ ... ]
"Like it or not, you are a slave. You admit you are a slave every April 15th! That's
when you sign forms that "voluntarily" lay bare to the government the most private
details of your life! And few people realize the income tax is a slave tax. It can never
be compatible with the life of a free people". ALAN KEYES - Republican Nominee for
President, unfortunately, the only Republican willing to speak out along with Ron Paul.
Visit here... Interest On The Debt! <http://www.geocities.com/cmcofer/interest.html>
...and gulp!
Sit down when you view it. People have fainted when they see the size of the Debt Hole
we're now in!
The "President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control", commonly referred to as the
1984 Reagan "Grace Commission Report" reveals that 100% of the "income tax" collected is
applied against the interest of the national debt. The government operates on a deficit
that is created from nothing by the Privately Owned Fed (owned by the same folks who own
the major commercial banks) at interest, i.e. what could be created debt free and usury
free by the Treasury has been usurped by the Banking Dynasties who have been ruling the
World since ancient times. Taxes are a way of controlling, or manipulating the economy.
They also give people a faith in the funny money -- makes it Near and dear to them.
Balanced budgets and budget surpluses are a smoke and mirror trick. They sound really
good, playwell for the people, but are nothing more than panderings. I'm not going into
it, period, but if any should care to make the study, you will be at first incredulous,
then angered by the depths of deception under which the people of this country labor.
Even the inventor of the electric light, Thomas Edison, joined the fray in criticizing
the system of the Federal Reserve: "If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue
a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also... It is
absurd to say that our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in
currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other
helps the people."
In President Lincoln's words (he was assassinated by the Banksters' agent) "The
Government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credits needed to
satisfy the spending power of the Government and the buying power of consumers. By the
adoption of these principles, the taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest."
"In a recent conversation with an official at the Internal Revenue Service, I was amazed
when he told me that 'If the taxpayers of this country ever discover that the IRS
operates on 90% bluff the entire system will collapse'". -Henry Bellmon, Senator (1969)
"Our federal tax system is, in short, utterly impossible, utterly unjust and completely
counterproductive [it] reeks with injustice and is fundamentally un-American... it has
earned a rebellion and it's time we rebelled". -President Ronald Reagan, May 1983,
Williamsburg, VA
"Our Income Tax system is a disgrace to the human race." -Jimmy Carter, said in 1976 by
the then President-to-be
"Eight decades of amendments... to [the] code have produced a virtually impenetrable
maze... The rules are unintelligible to most citizens... The rules are equally
mysterious to many government employees who are charged with administering and enforcing
the law". -Shirley Peterson, Former IRS Commissioner, April 14, 1993 at Southern
Methodist University
"The wages of the average American worker, after inflation and taxes, have decreased 17%
since 1973, the only Western industrial nation to so suffer". -Martin Gross, author of
"The Tax Racket: Government Extortion From A to Z"
~ more... ~
image from http://www.spitting-image.net
