Author: mrboma

In 1944, two leaders of the Jewish and Christian communities approached Pulitzer Prize winning philosopher Will Durant about creating a movement to raise moral standards. What emerged from this meeting was a decision to create a movement to fight intolerance, instead. Durant created the seminal document of this new movement, the “Declaration of INTERdependence.” The movement started with a bang, featuring gala events in Hollywood, and reached its apex when the Declaration was read into the Congressional Record on October 1, 1945 by the Honorable Ellis E. Patterson. However, the INTERdependence movement soon faded and was replaced by the civil rights movement.

The Will Durant Foundation has now reissued the Declaration of INTERdependence and is collecting signatures. Please proceed across the break to read the Declaration, then send an email to add your name to the signatories.

Declaration of INTERdependence
Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths:

· That differences of race, color, and creed are natural, and that diverse groups, institutions, and ideas are stimulating factors in the development of man;
· That to promote harmony in diversity is a responsible task of religion and statesmanship;
· That since no individual can express the whole truth, it is essential to treat with understanding and good will those whose views differ from our own;
· That by the testimony of history intolerance is the door to violence, brutality and dictatorship; and
· That the realization of human interdependence and solidarity is the best guard of civilization.

Therefore, we solemnly resolve, and invite everyone to join in united action.

· To uphold and promote human fellowship through mutual consideration and respect;
· To champion human dignity and decency, and to safeguard these without distinction of race, or color, or creed;
· To strive in concert with others to discourage all animosities arising from these differences, and to unite all groups in the fair play of civilized life.

ROOTED in freedom, bonded in the fellowship of danger, sharing everywhere a common human blood, we declare again that all men are brothers, and that mutual tolerance is the price of liberty.

To sign the Declaration of INTERdependence, send an email to  feedback@willdurant.com . Include your full name, country and city of origin, and occupation.

I originally posted a diary a long time ago addressing the right-wing demonization of the secular humanist left. I am re-issuing it below the fold with minor edits because of Senator Obama’s speech at the Call To Renewal Conference. Tragically, Senator Obama has embraced and used elements of the false narrative that the right-wing has constructed about secular humanism, saying:

“Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering the public square.”

As a result, “I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people and join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.”

At best, we may try to avoid the conversation about religious values altogether, fearful of offending anyone and claiming that – regardless of our personal beliefs – constitutional principles tie our hands. At worst, some liberals dismiss religion in the public square as inherently irrational or intolerant, insisting on a caricature of religious Americans that paints them as fanatical, or thinking that the very word “Christian” describes one’s political opponents, not people of faith.

Ironically, it is Senator Obama who has painted a caricature of secularists as fanatical, inherently irrational, intolerant, political opponents. In truth, there is only one organization that lobbies on behalf of secularists, The Secular Coalition for America, and they have a single lobbyist (Lori Lippman Brown) who’s hands are full dealing with BushCo’s clear violations of the separation clause. So, they are not out there trying to stifle any and all public religious expression. In fact, take a quick look at their website and you will see that the SCA readily and frequently engages in serious honest debate about faith and politics in our pluralist democracy. Like all things that come out of the right-wing, reality has been turned on its head regarding who is attacking whom in this conflict.

Senator Obama and others, please read on to educate yourself about secular humanism so that we may indeed have an honest and open discussion.
(Versions of this diary were originally posted at DKos, BT, MLW, and SP quite some time ago. New material is in bold.)

One element of fascism is the “Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause.” I call this “The Boogeyman Strategy.” It has been utilized by the right dating back at least as far as the red scare. Today, we have “evil-doers” and “terr’ists.” The southern strategy scapegoats blacks in order to get lower-class whites to vote GOP. Illegal immigrants and gays have also been made into major scapegoats in the last few election cycles.

There is another group that has been made into a boogeyman… a group that I am a part of. We are the “Secular Humanist Left.” Like Gays, we are one of the scapegoats the right has targeted with their “culture war.” On any given day you will hear O’Reilly et al attack secular humanists as the greatest force of immorality in our country, painting themselves as victims of a grand evil conspiracy being perpetrated by Satan’s secular humanist minions. Ironically, one of the lies the right tells about secular humanists is that we attack the religious, when really it is we who are being attacked by them. It is this part of the narrative Senator Obama tragically embraced in his speech.

The right isn’t alone is misunderstanding and villainizing secular humanism. I would like to help inform those of you who don’t know what secular humanism really is, and share a bit about how I reached my current world view.

Why should the rest of the left care about atheists being misrepresented? Because the right constantly associates liberalism with secular humanism. This makes sense, since there are many shared values between the two. As they misrepresent secular humanism, they also misrepresent liberalism. Maybe he doesn’t realize it because he isn’t familiar with the way the right-wing uses this frame, but when Senator Obama embraced part of the right’s attacks on secularists, he did the GOP’s dirty work of attacking all liberals. The right has made a conscious effort to turn 1/2 the country into the boogeyman, and Obama has stepped right into their trap. This should be a concern of all liberals. You could respond by abandoning secular humanists, which may be what Obama is suggesting, but I don’t think it is a liberal value to abandon allies, nor would it be politically prudent (there are 30+ million who identify as non-religious in America).

What are those values? What do secular humanists stand for? The Wikipedia gives a pretty succinct and accurate summary of secular humanism:

Secular humanism is an active lifestance that holds a naturalisic worldview and advocates the use of reason, compassion, scientific inquiry, ethics, justice and equality.

Does that sound evil and immoral to you? Of course not. Yet somehow Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and the rest of the right repeatedly conflate secular humanism with communism, Stalinism, Maoism, hedonism, fascism, and any other un-American “ism” you can think of. It is a way to lure the so-called “values voter.”

O’Reilly:

Patriotism, spirituality, respect for authority, and basic moral values are all under siege from a well-funded, secular lobby that envisions a society free of judgments about personal behavior. And if that society falls apart in the process, so be it.

So what is this “well-funded secular lobby” O’Reilly is talking about? It doesn’t exist. The Secular Coalition for America (SCA) is the only lobby focused on secularism, and they began lobbying on September 19, 2005 on a meager budget of donations. What is the SCA’s agenda? SCA Director and lobbyist Lori Lipman Brown says she will “direct the coalition’s activities and lobby U.S. Congressional representatives on issues arising out of the inappropriate incursion of religion into civil law.” Their mission statement:

The mission of the Secular Coalition for America is to increase the visibility and respectability of nontheistic viewpoints within the larger culture and to protect and strengthen secular government as the best guarantee of freedom for all.

Gee, Senator Obama, it looks like the secularists are the ones who have to lobby against being attacked in public discourse and are trying to promote pluralism. I’m sure they never expected that you would be one of the people misrepresenting them.

Moving on…
Rush Limbaugh:

Why did we allow liberalism, moral relativism, and secular humanism to poison our nation’s soul?

If these seem mild, don’t kid yourself. The message to the devoted is quite clear, especially since they constantly bathe their audiences in rhetoric like this.

Rush’s Brother David Limbaugh has been very outspoken in smearing secular humanism, including publishing books to defame and distort what we stand for:

“Liberals are just awful human beings who would love to see strong Christian values usurped and replaced with secular humanist non-vaules.”

Huh? I can understand how a religious nut might take offense to the promotion of reason and scientific inquiry, but how can you call compassion, justice, equality, and ethics non-values?

Note the way both Limbaugh brothers have connected liberalism and secular humanism. Whatever they call me, they call all liberals. Get it, Senator Obama?

Lesser known Right-wing radio host Tom Marsland has written:

The abbreviated list of secular humanist failures in the past century have included the former USSR, Communist China, Hitler’s National Socialism, Castro’s Cuba, Central American communism, Japanese imperialism and Mussolini’s Italian fascism.”

Pat Robertson:

How can there be peace when drunkards, drug dealers, communists, atheists, New Age worshipers of Satan, secular humanists, oppressive dictators, greedy moneychangers, revolutionary assassins, adulterers, and homosexuals are on top?” — “The New World Order”, 1991, P. 227

While the right deliberately twists secular humanism, others simply don’t seem to understand it. I did a Google search for definitions of “secular humanism” and found these:

1. A religious worldview where “man is the measure;” man, in himself, is the ultimate norm by which values are to be determined; all reality and life center upon man; man is god.

2. A form of religion that believes in humanistic values. Placing man before God. The thought that man is practically a god.

This is an important point: Secular humanism is NOT a religion, it is a worldview and is anti-dogmatic. There is no belief in the supernatural (God, spirits, angels, demons, miracles, etc), no rituals, rights, or sacraments. Many on the right call it a religion and say we are trying to replace one religion with another. They use this fiction to argue that secular humanist values (like science) should not be taught in schools, because that is state sponsorship of a religion. Quite an ironic position considering the right is trying to eliminate the separation anyway.

Secular means not religious, so the idea that secular humanism is a religion is either dishonest in the extreme or the people on the right have such small minds they can’t understand that you can have a worldview that is not a religion. If it is a set of beliefs and values, it must be a religion, right? And if there is a community which forms around that set of values and beliefs, it must be a religion, right? Wrong. Secular Humanist beliefs are an outgrowth of scientific and social scientific knowledge, so as our scientific, cultural, and historical understanding grows and changes, so does secular humanism. Additionally, you can disagree with points in the many humanist writings and still call yourself a secular humanist. Secular humanism is, by definition, anti-dogmatic — so to be dogmatic and say you have to have certain exact beliefs and values would be hypocritical in the extreme. Just visit a secular humanist website and you will see the kind of debate about all kinds of things that no religious establishment would ever tolerate. (By the way, there is such a thing as religious (non-secular) humanism as well — same values but belief in a higher power, too.)

Secular humanism does NOT compare humans to God — it rejects the notion of God altogether. In fact, isn’t it Christians who compare humans to God by saying we were created in the image of God? Secular humanism says that man is a naturally evolved animal, an imperfect part of nature no greater than any other animal; secular humanism is humble in that way.

Definition #3 almost gets it right:

3. The doctrine emphasizing a person’s capacity for self-realization through reason; rejects religion and the supernatural.

This is where the right gets claims about secular humanism being self-centered and hedonistic, but secular humanism isn’t just about the individual and self-realization. Humans are social animals, after all. Thus, there are social values that follow from secular humanism which are not addressed by definition #3.

Here is the Wikipedia definition again:

Secular humanism is an active lifestance that holds a naturalisic worldview and advocates the use of reason, compassion, scientific inquiry, ethics, justice and equality.

So where do right-wingers get off saying secular humanists are commies? Well, the first Humanist Manifesto (1933) did call for a communist economic system. However, the same manifesto and subsequent humanist statements also emphatically support democracy.

The secular humanist position is that society should do two things:

1. Provide for the needs of all its members.

2. Provide all of its members with the opportunity to achieve their potential.

It was clear when the first manifesto was written during the Great Depression (as it is now with the hurricanes) that unfettered capitalism simply does not do these two things. We now know that communism also does not provide these, and secular humanism has evolved since then. The modern secular humanist left generally believes a democratic socialist system is the best answer, with a mix of fundamental services provided by the government and a regulated capitalist marketplace for other goods and services.

It is also an important point of secular humanism that humans are social creatures, and we decide what kind of societies we create. All individuals have an impact on the societies in which they live, and therefore have a responsibility to help create a better society for themselves, their children, and others. Kenneth Phifer, one of the authors of the original Humanist Manifesto put it this way:

Humanism teaches us that it is immoral to wait for God to act for us. We must act to stop the wars and the crimes and the brutalities of this and future ages. We have powers of a remarkable kind. We have a high degree of freedom in choosing what we will do. Humanism tells us that whatever the philosophy of the universe may be, ultimately the responsibility for the kind of world in which we live rests with us.

What about the idea that Nazis, fascists, or Japanese imperialists were Secular Humanists?  This is a clear instance of the common right-wing tactic of simple dishonesty, saying all atheists/non-Christians are secular humanists. These groups clearly did not hold humanist values.

So how about some specifics (from The Affirmations of Humanism — see link below):

We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.

We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.

We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.

We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.

We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.

We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.

We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.

We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.

We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.

Boy, those sure are some dangerous ideas, aren’t they? People should be good to each other and work together? Isn’t that just about the most immoral and dangerous idea you have ever heard? OH NO, NO, NO!! We can’t have that!!

Ok, so there are some other points which clearly might be threatening to Christians, but they are no threat to the American way. After all, the Constitution is a completely secular document. Thus, I would assert that these points reinforce American values:

We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.

This is the main principal which opens secular humanists to the attack that we lack morals. How dare we suggest that morals are man made and don’t come from God?! That would mean we could decide killing is ok in certain circumstances! Well, it is — it’s called self defense, and our legal system recognizes it, too. The right loves to push the idea that humanism espouses moral relativism; just look back at the quote above from Rush. Moral relativism generally means moral rules are not applied the same for everyone (do as I say, not as I do), and it generally is a bad thing. But that isn’t what the above affirmation promotes; it isn’t an excuse for hypocrisy. The truth is, we all practice the kind of morality espoused by secular humanism all the time. Can’t we all imagine a circumstance in which war is morally justifiable (defense) and a circumstance in which it is not (aggression)? That is what humanist morality does — it evaluates acts within the circumstances in which they are committed. Now, if you look at the other values espoused by secular humanism, there are clear lines of right and wrong. No circumstance would justify bigotry, rape, or torture. Moral relativism is a straw-man.

We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.

We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.

We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.

We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.

We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.

We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.

We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.

How dare we suggest that truth comes from reason rather than the Bible?! How dare we suggest life should be enjoyed?! How dare we support the right to privacy and the right of people to choose with whom they have sex?! How dare we say health care is a right and not a privilege?! Such terrible non-values!!

Note how there is mention of “service to others” and “compassion over selfishness.” This goes back to the idea that all individuals have an impact on the societies in which they live, and therefore have a responsibility to create a better society. This is no threat to the American way… the Republican way maybe, the Bush way definitely, but not the American way.

I will take it one step further. These values are the key to winning the war on terrorism. I believe religious fundamentalism, Christian as well as Muslim, is the real threat. As long as religious fundamentalists exist, there will be religious conflict. Until all people see that every human life has value and that we are all global citizens, there will be war. Until the U.S. begins practicing what we preach about freedom and democracy, we will engender hatred and violence toward America and Americans. The Religious Right is the religious wrong.

The truth is that secular humanists are far more “christian” than the Christians who attack them. While the Christian right foments war and hate, the secular humanist left calls for peace and compassion. While the Christian right sees the rest of the world as potential enemies, potential converts, or potential cheap labor, the secular humanist left sees the rest of the world as our brothers and sisters deserving of respect and compassion. While the Christian right believes the Earth was given to us by God for us to “tame” and use, the secular humanist left believes the Earth is a shared ecosystem which humans often throw out of balance, threatening all life on the planet through irresponsible use and abuse. While the Christian right attacks gays and minorities, the secular humanist left believes they have a right to privacy, happiness, and equality. Maybe this is why they mistake it for a religion?

How did I become a secular humanist?

I was raised Catholic. I am the 12th of 16 children. I went to Catechism, had my First Communion, and my Confirmation. I was an altar boy. But my parents weren’t complete wackos, they actually taught me to feel sorry for people who didn’t believe in God.

When I went to college I made a friend who turned out to be an atheist. When the subject first came up, we had a conversation that went something like this:

Me: Isn’t it depressing not to believe in anything?

Him: I believe in something: Me, my potential, the infinite possibilities of my life and my ability to make good decisions. That’s not depressing, that’s empowering.

Me: But something greater than just you, I mean. Isn’t it depressing not having faith in anything greater than you?

Him: I do have faith in something greater than just me, too: humanity, human society. The way I see it, people create societies, people can have a positive or negative impact on their society, and people have to be responsible for creating a better society for themselves, their children, and others. I have faith that if people work together to create a good society, they can eventually do just that.

Me: But what about after you die?

Him: Then I hope I have left a good society for future generations.

Wow. No concern for his own soul or the afterlife, just concern for what is left behind for others. That struck me as one of the most selfless things I had ever heard. Any God who punished someone for such an attitude didn’t seem like a very good God to me. It was then that I stopped going to Church and began drifting away from my religion.

As I took college courses, my personal world view continued to evolve away from theism. I learned about many religions and found many of them more appealing than Catholicism. I learned about the evolution of our species, both physically and culturally, and saw how societies organize. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that religions are simply one way of organizing a society. It also seemed to me that more blood had been spilled over religion than for almost anything else (other than maybe territory disputes — and often the two were so intertwined as to be nearly inseparable).  How are wars waged in the name of the “Prince of Peace?” I began to become aware of how religions today foment conflict and hate, and promote exclusivity both in our own society and around the world. Why is it that religious laws only apply to the in-group?

All this time, my moral base remained firm. I found I didn’t need any kind of supernatural authority telling me stealing or killing or cheating are wrong. All I needed was to ask myself, “What would a society be like that allowed such things?” Thus, I eventually concluded that all of the morals I believe in could be reached through logical reasoning about how we should organize society. I didn’t realize that what I had begun believing had a name. Thanks to the internet, I have found there is a large community of people who believe the same things I do. It was very comforting to learn that a bunch of people could all use reason and compassion to reach the same conclusions I had.

If you are interested in learning more about Secular Humanism, visit the secular web, or learn about humanism interactively – explore the Continuum of Humanist Education.  (Uh oh… look out! It’s a trap to try and convert people to my “religion!” <snark> — I don’t care if you agree with me or not, I just want you to understand it before deciding either way).

There are now ten Humanist Manifestos and Declarations:

1. Humanist Manifesto I
2. Humanist Manifesto II
3. A Secular Humanist Declaration
4. A Declaration of Interdependence
5. IHEU Minimum Statement on Humanism
6. HUMANISM: Why, What, and What For, In 882 Words
7. Humanist Manifesto 2000: A Call for a New Planetary Humanism
8. The Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles
9. Amsterdam Declaration
10. Humanist Manifesto III (Humanism And Its Aspirations)

Just to reiterate, One of the great things about secular humanism is that I can read through these 10 statements and disagree with some of what they say and still call myself a secular humanist.

I will leave you with the words of the famous 19th century humanist Col. Robert G. Ingersoll, known as “The Great Agnostic:”

When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave of the clergy and their biblical revelations. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free–free to think, to express my thoughts–free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination’s wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself….I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously faced all the worlds.

My right-wing brother accused me of “tottering on the edge of fascism” recently when I listed “disseminating covert propaganda disguised as news broadcasts” among the many illegal things BushCo should be impeached for. My brother’s argument was that the liberal MSM promotes fascist group-think, so the administration has to combat that by putting out its own side of the story. He was actually arguing that government propaganda is protected free speech! As we all learned from our Former Dittohead friend Jim Derych, right-wingers easily dismiss anything that threatens their worldview as being a product of the imaginary “liberal media,” but my brother was taking it a step further.

Being called a fascist is nothing new; we on the left are often assailed by right-wingers calling us fascists. But I was a little stunned when my brother said it to me. Obviously, his argument is ridiculous, and when I challenged him to define fascism, all he came up with was that fascists don’t tolerate any differing opinions (oddly, earlier in our conversation he had said that the Democrats are “fragmented”… fragmented group-think, that’s a new one for me). To back his claim that fascism resides on the left end of the political spectrum, my brother cited the fact that the Nazi party was the National Socialist German Workers Party. But I can’t decide if he was being totally dishonest, or if he simply doesn’t recognize Hitler using the exact same tactic the GOP uses when they name things like the Clear Skies initiative, the Healthy Forests initiative, and the Help America Vote Act. No doubt it is a little of each.

Anyhow, I emailed my brother a few quotes about fascism to help clear up his misunderstanding. I didn’t go with a politician’s, historian’s, or pundit’s definition of fascism, either. Instead I went right to the source: Benito Mussolini.

Follow me across the break for the quotes and my analysis I sent to my brother, as well as some quotes from a piece written by Vice President Henry Wallace in 1944.
I have reformatted and rewritten my analysis a bit from what I sent to my brother.

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini (from Encyclopedia Italiana, Giovanni Gentile, editor).

“Fascism is an extreme right-wing ideology which embraces nationalism as the transcendent value of society. The rise of Fascism relies upon the manipulation of populist sentiment in times of national crisis. Based on fundamentalist revolutionary ideas, Fascism defines itself through intense xenophobia, militarism, and supremacist ideals. Although secular in nature, Fascism’s emphasis on mythic beliefs such as divine mandates, racial imperatives, and violent struggle places highly concentrated power in the hands of a self-selected elite from whom all authority flows to lesser elites, such as law enforcement, intellectuals, and the media.” —  translation of Mussolini’s diary by Ben Tripp

 Now substitute in the word neo-conservatism for fascism and see how well it fits.

“Neo-Conservatism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

Eisenhower warned us about the dangers of the military industrial complex, but this goes even further. GOP loyalists simply flow back and forth between government and corporations with government contracts (many of them of the no-bid variety). The New York Times has revealed that 90 former officials at the Department of Homeland Security or the White House Office of Homeland Security are now “executives, consultants or lobbyists for companies that collectively do billions of dollars’ worth of domestic security business.”

See also the K Street Project, the Carlyle Group, Haliburton/KBR, etc. Now the GOP rubber stamp Congress has refused to investigate the awarding of contracts by the executive branch. And don’t forget the bankruptcy bill written by the credit industry, the Medicare drug plan written by the pharmaceutical industry, and the energy policy authored by the energy companies. If these examples don’t demonstrate a merger of state and corporate power, then I don’t know what would. This is why I think the name BushCo fits them so well.

The Democrats are certainly not off the hook on encouraging corporatism. In particular, DLC Democrats are often beholden to corporate interests. But it is nowhere near the extent to which the GOP has become the tool of corporations. The only way I can see to fix this problem is through the elimination of ALL lobbyist gifts or contributions, strict policing of quid pro quos, and extending the period required before a former government official can take a job with a corporation that does business with the government.

“Neo-Conservatism is an extreme right-wing ideology which embraces nationalism as the transcendent value of society. The rise of Neo-Conservatism relies upon the manipulation of populist sentiment in times of national crisis. Based on fundamentalist revolutionary ideas, Neo-Conservatism defines itself through intense xenophobia, militarism, and supremacist ideals. Although secular in nature, Neo-Conservatism’s emphasis on mythic beliefs such as divine mandates, racial imperatives, and violent struggle places highly concentrated power in the hands of a self-selected elite from whom all authority flows to lesser elites, such as law enforcement, intellectuals, and the media.”

Let’s break it down point by point (I regroup things a little bit for analytical purposes):

“Extreme right-wing ideology which embraces nationalism as the transcendent value of society”: This is why they keep bringing up the flag burning amendment. It is a total waste of time, unless you consider the political capital they are trying to gain by pumping up nationalist sentiment.

The GOP and their surrogates in the media keep saying that anyone who disagrees with them is an America-hating, pro-terrorist traitor. My own brother even called me a fascist for saying that BushCo’s illegal, covert propaganda doesn’t belong on TV. Look at Sean Hannity’s books: “Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism”, and “Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism.” He paints liberalism as the opposite of nationalism, as anti-liberty, and as in league with terrorists! This ignores the fact that America was conceived as a liberal nation and has only made progress when striving to become more liberal. A simple review of U.S. history shows how conservatives have consistently been on the wrong side of every issue.

Regardless, through their propaganda and hate-mongers, the GOP has obscured, obfuscated, lied, and turned reality on its head when it comes to defining American values. They attack Democratic veterans as being anti-troops while claiming the politicians on their side who never went to war are the real patriots. The latest example is the right-wing reaction to the Hamdan ruling. Can you believe they are actually saying it is anti-American to abide by the rule of law, the Constitution, and our treaties?

“Manipulation of populist sentiment in times of national crisis”: This one is easy: the misuse of 9/11 to get authorization for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Administration officials intentionally inflated the sense of crises by fanning the fear of “weapons of mass destruction.” Each election cycle, they work to scare people into voting GOP against their own interests by saying the terrorists want Democrats to win or that the terrorists will hit us for sure if Dems are elected (among other things). Every time Kerry started to gain on or pass Bush in the polls, DHS would announce another Orange Alert (yet we have had NONE since the Presidential election… how odd). Now they are using “cut and run” rhetoric when talking about the Democratic plan to strategically redeploy our troops and end the occupation of Iraq, playing on people’s fear of losing a war.

“Fundamentalist revolutionary ideas”: It doesn’t get much more fundamentalist than the Christian fundamentalism of the Religious Right. Is Christian fundamentalism really revolutionary, you ask? Well, they do want to turn America into a theocracy, so I’d have to say, “Yes.” Just look at the pushes to overturn Roe v Wade and for an anti-gay marriage amendment. They even call their agenda a “culture war,” so revolutionary fundamentalism is the perfect descriptor for the Religious Right, IMHO.

“Xenophobia, supremacist ideals, and racial imperatives”: The good old Boogeyman strategy. Though they haven’t strictly adhered to racial/ethnic lines, there is no doubt that they use scapegoats to blame America’s problems on. The GOP and their mouth-pieces routinely scapegoat gays, immigrants, blacks, secularists, humanists, Hollywood, elitists, bad guys, ter’rists, Arabs, and others for all of the U.S.A.’s problems. Of course, their favorite scapegoat of all is liberals and the imaginary liberal media. Anyone who stands against them is automatically labeled a liberal, and in the same breath is called a grave threat to America. Look at the titles of Coulter’s books: “Godless”, “Treason”, “Slander”. Like Hannity’s books cited above, these books demonize liberalism, flat out lying about liberals and the liberal philosophy, and turn reality inside-out and upside-down.

“Divine Mandates”: George W. Bush loves to use Good vs Evil imagery (ie. “Axis of Evil”; “evildoers”). And who can forget when Bush called the U.S. attacks in the Middle East a crusade? He also said that freedom isn’t America’s gift to the world, but God’s gift to the world. The implication is that the U.S. military is an instrument of God! You don’t get much more divine a mandate than that. You could probably put the efforts to overturn Roe and outlaw gay marriage into this category as well… I’m sure the fundamentalists would.

“Militarism and violent struggle”: Just look at the PNAC’s Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century if you really want to see how frighteningly hawkish these folks really are. Once you have read that, you understand that one reason the GOP doesn’t want to withdraw from Iraq is that militarism and war has become such a defining element of their philosophy. They believe that America is the lone superpower remaining post-cold war, and as such, is in a unique position to gain hegemony over the globe – military, economic, and cultural. To accomplish this goal will require a vast military machine deployed worldwide, and especially in resource rich but unstable regions like the Middle East. We must fight and win multiple simultaneous wars to let everyone on the planet know that we cannot be challenged. Scary, huh?

And even if we do manage to end the occupation of Iraq, the administration has this one covered by declaring that we are in a perpetual “General War on Terror.” The right is also fixated on Bush as Commander in Chief. They might as well dress him up in a military uniform like Idi Amin or Joseph Stalin. By focusing on the Commander in Chief role, the right thinks they can justify a huge expansion in executive authority. Our civil liberties are being trampled and the power of the executive is being expanded beyond anything the Framers imagined, all in the name of fighting the never-ending GWOT.

“Highly concentrated power in the hands of a self-selected elite from whom all authority flows”: Some people call them the “Haves and Have-mores” but Bush calls them his base. Is it any wonder that all of the BushCo policies are aimed at helping the elites? From the repeal of the estate tax that would only effect the very wealthy, to the cutting of income taxes on the wealthiest 2%, to extending the lower rate on dividends, to the tax amnesty for companies hiding profits overseas, to weakening environmental protections, to refusing to raise the minimum wage. When Bush declares, “I’m the decider, not you” he wants everyone to know that he is in the seat of power. When the right calls Bush the Commander in Chief, they do so to reinforce his authority.

“Authority flows to lesser elites, such as law enforcement, intellectuals, and the media.”: I disagree with the notion that “intellectuals” have fallen in with this crowd – hence the right is constantly harping about the evil, liberal college professors. On the other hand, maybe this means people like the right wing think tanks and “puditry” – people like Grover Norquist. I wouldn’t call them intellectuals, but maybe some on the right would.

What about law enforcement? Honestly, I’m not too sure; I just don’t know enough about the subject. The purpose of consolidating law enforcement into the Department of Homeland Security was to allow better coordination between agencies, but it also may allow a higher degree of control from the top down than there was before. However, DHS was a Democratic proposal, so I’m not sure we can lay that one on BushCo. What I do know is that the administration actually had to do a purge at the CIA to get rid of the people who disagreed with BushCo’s misuse of intelligence and outing of covert operative Valerie Plame-Wilson and her WMD-monitoring operation. The NSA has been at the center of the illegal domestic spying programs.

Please note the “media” in this quote. This would be the Fox News, Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, Malkin, and O’Reilly types – lying vitriol spewers – as well as the Judith Miller, David Brooks, Robert Novak, and Charles Krauthammer types – so-called “respectable journalists” – who are little more than propagandists who shill for the administration. It is scary how the GOP talking points reverberate through the echo chamber and onto the public airwaves and pages. One of them, Tony Snow, has now ascended the ladder into the inner circle of the administration – you don’t get a more clear example of power flowing from the top to an obedient “lesser elite” than that.

I suppose you could make the case that the power has actually flowed in the other direction, from the media up, before it is then fed back to the media in a sort of positive feedback loop. This explains why there is no liberal media anymore: they are all trying to get a peice of this pie being handed down from the top.

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As I was re-writing this to post here, Thom Hartmann made me aware of the piece written by Vice President Henry Wallace for the New York Times in 1944. Hartmann wrote about the Wallace article two years ago on Common Dreams (The Ghost of Vice President Wallace Warns: “It Can Happen Here” ). Wallace’s article was a warning about creeping fascism and how Americans could recognize and combat American fascists. Like me, Wallace turned to Mussolini for his definition of fascism as corporatism. I forwarded Hartmann’s article to my brother as further back-up for the Mussolini email.

The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy.

Holy crapoly! This is exactly what I was just talking about with the media: Fox News, Hannity, Limbaugh, Coulter, Malkin, O’Reilly, Judith Miller, David Brooks, Robert Novak, and Charles Krauthammer. Throw in the covert propaganda disseminated by the administration and the GOP talking points, and I would say our public information is severely poisoned. And that poison is designed, in part, to divide Americans. Again, when Bush said he is “a uniter, not a divider,” he was saying the opposite of what he meant. Bill Clinton echoed this sentiment when he spoke at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and said that the GOP wants us divided. And the GOP talking points often contain B.S. about the Democrats being disunified or fragmented.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. … They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.

The Neo-cons know that the ruthless pursuit of profits and power does not play very well with the public. But, by following the PNAC and Mussolini outlines, BushCo is able to hide their deceit and ruthless pursuit of profits and power behind the disingenuous mask of patriotism during wartime. As I stated above, this wartime front is used to trample our rights and anyone who questions the breach of our rights is immediately labeled a traitor or terrorist sympathizer. It is sick and twisted.

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where they left off, after ‘the present unpleasantness’ ceases. [These monopolists] are willing to jeopardize the structure of American liberty to gain some temporary advantage. Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.

While we have few true monopolies, we have a lot of industries dominated by what I would consider cartels: a few large companies in collusion to control the market and that don’t really compete with each other. The oil/energy cartel, pharmacy cartel, defense cartel, communications cartel, media cartel… I’m sure I’m missing a lot of other examples here. Even companies that are not cartels, like Wal-Mart, could fit this quote. Wal-Mart moves into a community and squashes all the locally owned businesses.

There is a very important underlying truth here: There is no such thing as a free market. When there is no regulation, monopolies and cartels stomp out any competition, and abuse the market, laborers, consumers, and the environment. So, the choice is a regulated market with real competition, or an unregulated market controlled by monopolies and cartels that prevent any real competition. BushCo has done nothing but weaken, eliminate, or fail to enforce existing regulations.

The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination…

Here Wallace covers the boogeyman strategy. The neo-cons are certainly more subtle in most ways about expressing and spreading their hate, but it is still there and plays a major role in their political strategy. Wallace is saying that it is a difference of degree rather than kind that separates the holocaust from the anti-gay marriage amendment or the voter suppression of minorities.

So, between Mussolini and Wallace, I think it is pretty clear that fascism lies on the other side of the political spectrum, and that the GOP is not just tottering on the edge… but has already plunged headlong into the pit.
————————————

I never heard back from my brother on the Mussolini quotes or Hartmann article I sent him. He probably didn’t even read them. If he did, he probably didn’t recognize the parallels to BushCo I pointed out. No doubt, his brain put up its force-field before he started reading and all the parallels were automatically deflected away as group-think from the liberal media. One of my other brothers says I am too blunt and confrontational, but when someone calls me a fascist, how am I supposed to react?

One last thing… Here is the new GOP logo I created.  Should I send this to my brother, or is it too blunt and confrontational?

I really enjoy listening to Thom Hartmann when he guest hosts on Air America (I don’t get him on any of my local stations and have trouble streaming him). He brings scholarship and a historical accuracy and perspective that is often lacking in talk radio.

Anyhow, Thom has been pushing the idea of reframing the Iraq quagmire. We won the war in short order, he says. We overthrew the government, killed or arrested the opposition government officials, disbanded the army, destroyed infrastructure, and seized resources. We are now engaged in what is rightfully called the OCCUPATION OF IRAQ. Hartmann has now written a post at Common Dreams detailing his reframe: Reclaim the Issues – “Occupation, Not War”

I wrote a diary on the pluses and minuses of this reframe here, but that was before Hartmann published. So, I’ll repeat some of that diary as I look at Hartmann’s article across the break.

Now, before we jump, repeat after me: end the occupation, end the occupation, end the violent occupation of Iraq
Hartmann begins by demonstrating why he says the war is over and we won:

There is no longer a war against Iraq.

It ended in May of 2003, when George W. Bush stood below a “Mission Accomplished” sign aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and correctly declared that we had “victoriously” defeated the Iraqi army and overthrown their government.

Our military machine is tremendously good at fighting wars – blowing up infrastructure, killing opposing armies, and toppling governments. We did that successfully in Iraq, in a matter of a few weeks. We destroyed their army, wiped out their air defenses, devastated their Republican Guard, seized their capitol, arrested their leaders, and took control of their government. We won the war. It’s over.

Here is the drawback to saying we won the war: Bush gets to say HE won the war. That could be a deal-breaker for some. No way, no how do we give BushCo an easy out or a victory of any sort. But I would respond to these people by reminding them that Americans are not stupid. They will recognize that it is a hollow declaration of victory. We all recognized how hollow it was when Nixon declared victory in Vietnam as he pulled our troops out. And we all recognized how hollow it was when Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier with his flight suit and cod piece in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner. But he did make that speech, so let’s use it to bring our guys and gals home.

Hartmann doesn’t mention it, but Bush isn’t the only one who could save some face with the declaration of victory. This reframe would allow Democrats who voted for the use of force to save face as well. They can say, as John Kerry has, that they voted for the use of force (under false pretenses), but never voted for the extended occupation.

Plus, we get to praise our troops for doing a fine job. That helps quiet the GOP talking point that we are against the troops. When given an appropriate and well defined mission, our troops can’t be beat. But they aren’t trained to handle an indefinite occupation, and the GOP is asking them to do so without the necessary manpower or equipment.

Repeat after me: end the occupation, end the occupation, end the violent occupation of Iraq

What we have now is an occupation of Iraq.

The occupation began when the war ended, and continues to this day. According to our own Pentagon estimates, at least ninety five percent of those attacking our soldiers are Iraqi civilians who view themselves as anti-occupation fighters. And last week both the Defense Minister and the Vice President of Iraq asked us for a specific date on which the occupation would end.

Again, Hartmann doesn’t flesh out the full extent to which this  information could be used once we have changed the debate to occupation instead of war. We can conclude that if we are occupiers and most of the people fighting us are freedom fighters, then we aren’t “fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here.” Iraq is NOT a front in the war on terror. Instead, Iraq is a distraction from the WOT, and is helping create new terrorists who we may someday have to fight over here. That is ammunition we can use against the GOP. Iraq distracts, and the longer we’re there the more terrorists we create.

Repeat after me: end the occupation, end the occupation, end the violent occupation of Iraq

The distinction between “war” and “occupation” is politically critical for 2006 because wars can be won or lost, but occupations most honorably end by redeployments.

We won World War II and it carried Roosevelt to great political heights. We lost the Vietnam War and it politically destroyed Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Jerry Ford. And as we fought to a draw in Korea, it so wounded Harry S. Truman politically that he didn’t have a strong enough base of support to run for re-election against Dwight D. Eisenhower.

American’s don’t like to lose or draw at a war. Even people who oppose wars find it uncomfortable, at some level, to lose, and Republican strategists are using this psychological reality for political gain. When wars are won – even when they’re totally illegal and undeclared wars, like Reagan’s adventure in Grenada – it tends to create a national good feeling.

On the other hand, when arguably just wars, or at least legally defensible “police action” wars, like Korea, are not won, they wound the national psyche. And losing a war – like the German loss of WWI – can be so devastating psychologically to a citizenry that it sets up a nation for strongman dictatorship to “restore the national honor.”

On the other hand, an “occupation” is something that logically should one day end, and, if it’s an expensive occupation in lives or money, will find popular support to end as soon as possible.

Thus, this reframe takes away the “cut and run” meme the GOP is repeating ad nauseam. Democrats are not advocating that we lose the war. That would be impossible given that we already won the war. Ending the occupation is a good thing. It is a necessary step to return full sovereignty to the Iraqis as they forge a new democracy. When the GOP opposes the end of the occupation through the redeployment of troops out of Iraq, they are revealing their true goal is imperialism. That is a weapon we can wield against them. The GOP are imperialists.

Repeat after me: end the occupation, end the occupation, end the violent occupation of Iraq

If Democrats can succeed over the next three months in making it clear to average Americans that the “War In Iraq” ended in 2003, and that we’re now engaged in an “Occupation Of Iraq,” then Democratic suggestions to end or greatly diminish the occupation will take on a resonance and cogency that will both help them in an election year, and help to bring our soldiers to safety and Iraq to stability.

On the other hand, if Democrats are perceived as pushing for America to “lose the war in Iraq,” they will be vilified and damned by Republicans and many swing voters, and could thus lose big in 2006.

The “War” is over. The Occupation has now lasted 3 years and one month – far longer than necessary.

That is the key… getting this reframe to echo through the media to Joe Sixpack. Every Democrat that shows up on the Sunday talk shows needs to say “occupation” as often as possible. They need to correct the host when the host says “war.” They need to correct the GOP guest when they say “war.” They need to say: “We won the war in 2003. Now we need to end the occupation. America is not an imperialist nation.”

Repeat after me: end the occupation, end the occupation, end the violent occupation of Iraq

If the Democrats don’t shift the discussion from “war” to “occupation,” the Republicans will succeed in painting them as being “in favor of losing a war,” which will destroy their electoral possibilities.

Instead, every time a Republican or a member of the press uses the Rove slogan “War in Iraq,” Democrats need to correct them by saying, “You mean the Occupation of Iraq…”

As I stated in my previous diary, by reframing the quagmire, we lose the power of the War vs Peace frame. However, that can easily be replaced if we say “violent occupation” every third time we say “occupation,” as I did above. Now we have the Violent Occupation vs Peace frame, and the choice is still quite obviously peace.

Repeat after me: end the occupation, end the occupation, end the violent occupation of Iraq

How can I make such a statement when our soldiers are still in Iraq and being killed daily? It is a matter of framing that Thom Hartmann brought to my attention on Monday night when he guest-hosted the Majority Report. By most historians’ definition, a war is over when one country overthrows the government of another country. We did that long ago in Iraq. What we have now is a violent occupation.

I have thought about it, and I have to agree with Hartmann that if I were writing a history book on the subject, the War in Iraq would have ended with the overthrow of Saddam, and the subsequent years would be called the Violent Occupation of Iraq. That doesn’t necessarily make it good politics, though.

So what? What’s the difference? Well, across the fold I take a look at how this simple reframing can change the whole argument. It could potentially help us get our soldiers out, but may also grant Bush a slight saving of face.
In a war, people think in terms of winners and a losers, and no one wants to be a loser. Within this new frame, we can declare victory and Bush can save face. Why on Earth would I want that? So that we can start withdrawing troops. We must weigh our political desires against the lives of the soldiers.

Bush isn’t the only one who would save face; this reframe would allow Democrats who voted for the use of force to save face as well. They can say, as John Kerry has, that they voted for the invasion (under false pretenses), but never voted for the extended occupation.

Additionally, the “cut and run” GOP talking point is nullified. We have already won, so how could they say we are cutting and running? Within this frame, we are simply leaving or redeploying. Withdrawal from an occupation isn’t “cutting and running,” it is returning sovereignty to the people of Iraq, and is therefore a necessary step in spreading Democracy.

Once we have shifted the conversation to our violent occupation of Iraq, we can start talking about American Imperialism. Withdrawal of troops demonstrates that we are not trying to be an imperialist power. If the GOP opposes it, they show how pro-imperialist they really are. That does not play well internationally nor at home.

This frame-shift also disarms the GOP talking point that attacks on Americans in Iraq are necessarily the work of terrorists. Instead, many of those attacks can be seen as the work of proud Iraqis trying to liberate their home (freedom fighters, as Cindy Sheehan called them). When the GOP says, “We are fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here,” we can respond that we are fighting Iraqi citizens who want us out, not international terrorists. Or that we are creating terrorists over there that we may some day have to deal with over here. The longer we stay, the more we create.

There are certainly drawbacks to this frame:

Occupation does not sound as bad as war to most people. We are often stuck within the frame of War vs Peace, and we would be sacrificing that frame with this switch. However, if we throw in the qualifier “violent” every third time we say occupation, I think that minimizes the loss of the War vs Peace frame. We would still have Violent Occupation vs Peace, which might prove even more powerful. After all, one can easily argue for a just war, but I think it is harder to argue for a just violent occupation.

Perhaps the bigger drawback is that it does allow Bush to save some face. That will prove too much for some people; no way no how do we give Bush an easy out. But I would respond to these people by saying that Americans are not stupid. They will recognize that it is a hollow declaration of victory. We all recognized how hollow it was when Bush stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier with his flight suit and cod piece in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner. But he did make that speech, so let’s use it to bring our guys and gals home. I am not willing to play politics with our soldiers’ lives. If it is really such a huge concern, then wait until after the November elections and start the reframing in the new congress.

What do you think, good strategy, or political folly?

I recently received a promotional email from Borders promoting Ann Coulter’s new work of fiction, “Godless.” In the mailing, they call her a “political firebrand.” I worte to borders to express my disappointment:

There are many legitimate political books that have been released in the last few months, yet Borders has chosen to promote the book by Coulter? That is mind-boggling, and extremely disappointing. She is not a “political firebrand,” she is a hate-mongering propagandist. The inaccuracies and lies in Coulter’s earlier books are extremely well documented (do a Google search for: Coulter book lies).

Just because an author’s books sell well does not make her work good, accurate, or worthy of your promotion. You should at least list the book under Fiction where it belongs.

Follow me across the break to read their limp response and my follow-up.
As expected, Borders wrote back that they maintain political neutrality and sell the books Borders readers want to buy:

Thank you for writing to Borders with your concerns about our title selection.

Borders believes in the basic right of our customers to choose what they want to read and buy, and we feel that it is important for us not to take any political stance-but instead to remain a neutral store where customers can gather information about any topic and any opinion.  We do not practice preferential treatment to authors based upon the author’s political views; we simply carry and market all titles we feel our customers will buy.

In fact, our inventory is based primarily on what Borders shoppers have shown they are interested in purchasing-only 50% of the titles in our stores are common to every store and the other 50% is driven entirely by the shopping habits of our customers.  As a result inventory varies greatly from store to store.  All of the hot sellers are stocked in every Borders store.

We firmly believe that our customers are intelligent, curious people who enjoy exploring all types of books and periodicals.  They come to Borders because they know we carry a variety of titles that vary in political views, tastes and interests and our selection of titles is as diverse as the customers that we are proud to serve.  

Thanks once again for sharing your comments with us.  If you have any further questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us at ccare@bordersstores.com.

Sincerely,

Jeanette
Borders Customer Care
http://www.bordersstores.com

Well, this is not a satisfactory response. When talking about Coulter, it isn’t her political slant that is the issue, it is her dishonesty and hate speech. This is like news programs that say they are just being fair and balanced when they report what each side says, without mention that one side is totally full of shit. So here is my response to Jeanette:

My issue was not with you selling the Coulter book, it was with your promotion of the book. You choose a very limited number of titles to include in your promotional mailings, emailings, and brochures. I was extremely disappointed that your bookstore chose to include the work of an author whose past work has been proven to be grossly inaccurate and filled with hate speech, all politics aside.

As you state, that choice was based on the fact you “feel your customers will buy” Ms. Coulter’s book. That may be smart marketing if your only concern is the bottom line, but I would hope any business would also seek to be socially responsible. Promoting a book full of inaccuracies and hate speech, regardless of the political slant, is not socially responsible, and that is why I am disappointed.

According to researchers at MIT, the government could actually benefit from the use of tinfoil hats by conspiracy theorists. The research shows that tinfoil amplifies government frequencies, rather than blocking them. So this raises the question, did the government covertly start the tinfoil hat myth in order to trick anti-government types into helping the government track them?

“It has long been suspected that the government has been using satellites to read and control the minds of certain citizens. The use of aluminum helmets has been a common guerrilla tactic against the government’s invasive tactics [1]. Surprisingly, these helmets can in fact help the government spy on citizens by amplifying certain key frequency ranges reserved for government use. In addition, none of the three helmets we analyzed provided significant attenuation to most frequency bands.”

Update [2006-6-3 17:45:38 by mrboma]: Click here for the CBS News story

My parents are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary this weekend. Not a huge deal, but still a great accomplishment in my opinion. Now consider that my family is one of the largest in the U.S., and this becomes a story for the media. How big is my family? I am one of 16 children, ten boys, six girls – all the same mom and dad and all single births – ranging in age from 49 to 26. Now top it off with the fact that this will be the first time the whole family has gotten together since 1981 (photo from that occasion is in the extended text. Still need more? This day was almost prevented when my Dad was literally RUN OVER BY A CITY BUS in 1989 (see the press release in the extended text).

The coverage started on Thursday with this article in the local freebee, The Grunion Gazette. The larger locals, the Long Beach Press-Telegram and LA Times, are supposed to be running stories on Saturday or Sunday. We are being interviewed by KCAL/CBS on Friday (to be played on the noon news and maybe the later newscasts if it is a slow news day). KCAL/CBS and KTLA are also sending cameras to the anniversary party on Saturday, so we should be on the Saturday evening news as well. LA Family Magazine will be running a story next month some time.

To read the press release and see the 1981 photo, please proceed across the bump.

NEWS RELEASE

Contact:
Jerome Santucci
562-961-7578
jeromesantucci@earthlink.net

LONG BEACH COUPLE TO CELEBRATE 50 YEARS OF MARRIAGE AND SIXTEEN CHILDREN

Long Beach, Calif., May 18, 2006 – Ken and Colette Santucci, Long Beach residents and parents of sixteen children, will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary on June 2.  The couple will renew their vows on June 3 at the same church in which they were originally married in 1956 – St. Bartholomew’s Catholic Church in Long Beach.

All sixteen children will be in attendance, marking the first time since 1981 that the entire family has been together.

Ken, originally from New York, and Colette, a California girl, planned to have a dozen children.  They had their first child, a girl, in 1957.  Over the next 23 years, Colette gave birth to fifteen more children, all single births – ten boys and five more girls, with the last born in 1980.

Over the years, the family endured a number of obstacles and hardships.  In July of 1989, Ken was literally run over by a Long Beach Transit bus when he was thrown from his bicycle on the way home from work.  Miraculously, he survived, suffering only a broken pelvis and other minor injuries.  Six months later, he was back on the job at McDonnell Douglas (now Boeing), where he worked for over 40 years as an electrical engineer before retiring in 2003.

In an effort to make more room for the kids, the family built a second story on their Long Beach home, adding five bedrooms and a bathroom. Most of the planning and construction, which lasted from 1972 through mid-1974, was completed by the family themselves, with Ken’s father also helping out.

The Santucci children, who range in ages from 49-26, are (from oldest to youngest): Anna, Susan, Kenneth, Patrick, Theresa, Francis, Paul, Monica, Christopher, David, Peter, Jerome, Mark, Anastacia, Gregory, and Rebecca.

 April 2006 Issue of Discover Magazine has an article entitled Anything Into Oil about a “thermal conversion process” developed by Changing World Technologies (CWT), that can extract oil from almost any waste. How is this possible? Think of it this way: carbon buried in the Earth’s crust for thousands of years can turn to diamond under the extreme heat and pressure. We can mimic that heat and pressure in the lab to create diamonds in a matter of days. Well, oil is produced in the same way – extreme heat and pressure coming to bear on biologicals over thousands of years – and we can likewise mimic the process to create oil (and extract other useful byproducts) from waste in a matter of hours. Yes, hours. Basically, this process makes oil a renewable resource. It isn’t a pipe-dream either; there is a small, operational, proof-of-concept plant in Pennsylvania and a full-sized working plant converting Butterball Turkey waste in Carthage, Missouri.

Additionally, the process destroys bacteria, viruses, and prions (the infectious proteins that cause mad cow and related diseases), eliminates toxins and carcinogens, and breaks down non-biodegradables. The useful byproducts include water and a potent, organic fertilizer. Plus, it would reduce the need for landfills. To top it off, it creates far more energy than it uses. This is the ultimate in recycling.

Yes, we should be working to get ourselves off of oil, but that will take a long time. In the meantime, this could ease the transition and help make us energy independent. I have already sent a letter to my mayor and city council asking them to look into the technology.

Read below the break for more about this amazing technology.
Here is what CWT says about the thermal conversion process (TCP), also known as thermal depolymerization (from CWT website):

Many technologies have been used over the years to destroy troublesome waste (bioremediation, incineration, gasification), but at an expense to the environment. Now, technological development has produced new processes that allow waste streams to be reformed into valuable and marketable alternative fuel products, thereby minimizing the environmental effects.

The TCP successfully converts fats, bones, cartilage, feathers and other wastes into renewable diesel, high-quality fertilizers, and valuable specialty chemicals. Unlike pyrolysis and gasification, TCP works with a wet feedstock. Since most waste streams are wet, there’s no need to expend energy drying the materials.

Agricultural wastes alone make up approximately 50% of the total yearly waste generation (6 billion tons) in the U.S. With the TCP, the 6 billion tons of agricultural waste could be effectively converted into 4 billion barrels of oil. Realizing this incremental domestic energy production is clearly in our national interest, because it ensures greater national energy independence. At the same time, this production provides a permanent solution to serious environmental problems caused by current waste disposal practices.

How does it work? Here is how Discover describes the Carthage plant converting Butterball waste:

The first thing a visitor sees when he steps into the loading bay is a fat pressurized pipe, which pushes the guts from the receiving hopper into a brawny grinder that chews them into pea-size bits. Dry feedstocks like tires and plastics need additional water at this stage, but offal is wet enough. A first-stage reactor breaks down the stuff with heat and pressure, after which the pressure rapidly drops, flashing off excess water and minerals. In turkeys, the minerals come mostly from bones, and these are shunted to a storage bin to be sold later as a high-calcium powdered fertilizer.

The remaining concentrated organic soup then pours into a second reaction tank–Appel says the two-stage nature of the process distinguishes it from dozens of failed single-stage waste-to-oil schemes devised over the last century–where it is heated to 500 degrees Fahrenheit and pressurized to 600 pounds per square inch. In 20 minutes, the process replicates what the deep earth does to dead plants and animals over centuries, chopping long, complex molecular chains of hydrogen and carbon into short-chain molecules. Next, the pressure and temperature drop, and the soup swirls through a centrifuge that separates any remaining water from the oil. The water, which in the case of slaughterhouse waste is laden with nitrogen and amino acids, is stored to be sold as a potent liquid fertilizer. Meanwhile, the oil goes to the storage tank to await the next truck. The whole process is efficient, says Terry Adams, the company’s chief technology officer: Only 15 percent of the potential energy in the feedstock is used to power the operation; 85 percent is embodied in the output of oil and other products.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, it isn’t (from Discover):

The oil itself meets specification D396, a type widely used to power electrical utility generators. The oil can be sold to utilities as is, further distilled into vehicle-grade diesel and gasoline, or, via a steam process, made into hydrogen.

“I’m impressed,” says Gabriel Miller, a New York University chemistry professor and a consultant to KeySpan Corporation, a gas and electric utility that serves New York. “The fuel that comes out is better than crude, and you don’t need a refinery to use it. I think they can bring it deep into commercialization.” Miller has recommended that KeySpan burn the oil in its generators.

CWT thinks their process may not face as many obstacles as other alternatives because it is not challenging the current energy producers or oil empires (from CWT website):

CWT can also work seamlessly within existing petroleum infrastructures. Rather than rendering the oil industry obsolete, TCP can access and utilize the infrastructure for additional refinery support for the creation of specialized products. The oil industry’s pipelines and energy stations can be used to transport and distribute TCP renewable diesel… The provision of a new and reliable source of “crude” for refineries will be viewed favorably by major oil companies.

For more about a potential alliance between CWT and the oil companies and why CWT also believes the power generation and heating oil industries will be more likely to embrace them than alternatives, see the CWT website.

So this technology should be ready to take off, right? Well, sort of. Discover says that TCP has gotten a great deal of interest in Europe because of the fear of mad cow disease. It is believed the disease is spread by feeding infected animals back to livestock, so most European countries have banned the practice. That means Europe has an emerging animal waste problem. Thermal conversion plants would solve that problem as well as produce oil, so CWT would be paid on both ends: first for taking the waste and then for the oil it produces. That means it would be very profitable for CWT to set up shop in Europe.

In spite of the dangers posed by prions, we continue to use animal waste as a food source for our livestock in the U.S. That means any TCP plant in the U.S. would have to pay for the waste, making the production costs prohibitive. According to Discover, only California, Pennsylvania, and Virginia have incentives that could make the process financially worthwhile. Maybe avian flu will scare people enough to finally put an end to feeding animal wastes back to our livestock.

CWT also links the potential spread of animal born diseases and global warming in a way I have not seen done before. As global warming increases the frequency and ferocity of storms, animal death and displacement could pose a health threat (from CWT website:

In Hurricane Katrina alone, over 25,000 heads of cattle in Louisiana needed to be incinerated. The world also currently lacks the infrastructure to vaccinate entire continents of people from potential plagues, and so needs to develop a strategy of containment and destruction for infected animals.

But it isn’t just animal waste that can be utilized. CWT thinks cities should be salivating over their technology, because municipal waste could make cities energy independent while helping solve expanding waste management problems (from CWT website):

The common link across all market sectors is the challenge to develop more efficient, environmentally friendly technologies that reduce or eliminate the current waste streams produced. No where is this challenge felt more than in cities and municipalities where the accumulation of large amounts of landfill waste and the treatment and/or disposal of sewage sludge pose huge problems.

By establishing TCP plants designed to utilize MSW and/or MSS, municipalities could have a solid foundation upon which to expand their other core businesses, while eliminating the costly ones. The TCP can enhance the success of municipal recovery facilities (MRF) by taking the low-value recycled materials and processing them into valuable oils and solids. Landfill costs and liabilities can be reduced or eliminated. Sludges and other organic material, including mixed plastics, can all be processed after valuable materials such as ferrous metals, non-ferrous metals and glass are separated at the MRF. Estimates are that overall costs to municipalities for processing MSW and MSS can be significantly reduced.

And CWT isn’t just talking about cities in the Industrialized nations. Today, cities in industrializing nations are some of the dirtiest, unhealthiest places in the world. CWT thinks their technology could help industrialize the so-called third world in a more environmentally friendly way than is currently happening. Another benefit to developing nations is that the localized nature of the system would eliminate the need to develop such a complex infrastructure (from CWT website):

Many of the products manufactured by the TCP can ultimately be used to provide refrigeration, telecommunications, electricity and potable water – the basic elements for enhancing industrialization. Since the TCP converts waste generated by a community into a valuable fuel source, there is limited need for an expansive infrastructure comprised of tankers, pipelines, and numerable energy transfer stations.

One area the technology may gain some traction in the U.S. is in automotive waste disposal (from Discover):

American recyclers deftly pluck nearly all the metal from the 15 million cars junked each year, but up to 4.5 million tons of residual debris goes straight to landfills. Known as auto shredder residue, it is a virtually unrecyclable mix of at least 36 kinds of plastic, along with treated fabrics, rubber, and nylon.

Last May representatives of USCAR–a research consortium made up of DaimlerChrysler, Ford, and General Motors–along with the Argonne National Laboratory and the American Plastics Council arranged a test in which Changing World Technologies ran 3,000 pounds of the awful stuff through its Philadelphia pilot plant.

“The process is brilliant,” says Candace Wheeler, a GM research scientist. “There are substances of concern in shredder residue such as PCBs, and traditional incineration of chlorinated plastics can make dioxins.” But, she says, the preliminary test results indicate that the hydrolysis at the heart of the thermal conversion process breaks down the PCBs and converts the chlorine into hydrochloric acid. “No PCBs. No dioxins. No emissions,” says Wheeler, noting that the principal output of the process was a “light oil” that could be used at an electric power generation plant. “It looks good from all perspectives,” she says. “We think it has great potential.”

A lot of attention has also recently been focused on technology waste. Computers and other electronics contain a lot of toxins and carcinogens that thermal conversion could neutralize. Are you listening, Silicon Valley?

Want to know more about the organic fertilizer byproduct (from Discover)?

Along with oil, the thermal conversion process cranks out a liquid fertilizer that “works a great deal like some of the instant-gratification fertilizers out there,” says Jim Freiss, vice president of engineering for Changing World Technologies. Featuring 9 percent nitrogen, 1 percent phosphorus, 2 percent potash, and 19 amino acids, it is, in essence, “an organic Miracle-Gro,” he says. “In the organic industry, these kinds of nutrient concentrations are unheard-of. The best that’s out there is on the order of 6 percent nitrogen.”

Tests on tomato and pepper plants conducted by Joseph Kloepper, professor of plant pathology at Auburn University in Alabama, confirmed the fertilizer’s potency. “In my experience,” he wrote in a summary paper, “it is rare to find a biological product that demonstrates such a consistent promotion of overall plant growth and root growth on two crops in two different field soils.”

Fertilizer-industry officials are excited as well. “Because it has been through high temperatures, there is no coliform bacteria or any of the other problems often associated with organic fertilizers such as manures,” says Raj Mehta, president of Organica Biotech, a manufacturer of nonsynthetic fertilizers and pesticides. “I’m convinced there will be a large market for this.”

Ok, so we would still be burning carbon-based (fossil) fuels. That is bad for the environment, right? Well, CWT argues that their process would allow the carbon that is in the Earth to stay there, cutting down on the new carbon being added to the carbon cycle (from CWT website):

A committed global shift to the Thermal Conversion Process would allow carbon deposits below ground to remain there. All surface objects, both organic and man-made would exist only as temporary carbon carriers. At the end of their usefulness, they would be converted by TCP technology into short-chain fuels, fertilizers and industrial raw materials. People and plants would then reconvert them into temporary carbon carriers once again. Because the only carbon used would be that which exists above ground, the opportunity for CO2 to further increase and accumulate dangerously in the atmosphere could be virtually eliminated.

I’m not sure how much I buy this. After all, we bury a lot of the waste produced now, so aren’t we currently re-interring a lot of carbon that would not be re-buried if we adopt TCP? Still, CWT says its process has been independently analyzed and found to be much more environmentally friendly than burning coal or oil pumped from the ground (from CWT website):

Our technology’s lifecycle has also been analyzed, and was shown to provide positive global environmental benefits with regard to global warming, environmental acidification and oxidation of nitrogen. CWT hopes that the introduction of a diesel product which meets the specifications of petroleum diesel, but made from a renewable source (organic waste), can help bridge the gap from traditional oil drilling and foreign imports to domestic waste reformation and sustainable energy.

So, what do you think? Brilliant, or folly?

This is the weekly summary of the Humanist Network News (HNN). The HNN is published every Wednesday via e-mail and on the Institute for Humanist Studies (IHS) Web site. This diary is a slightly reformatted copy of the weekly email they send me, which I post here every Thursday (Yes, I have permission from the IHS). (CP @ MLW, BT, SP)

March 16, 2006
Humanist Network News
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

1. Agnostic Mom: The complication of simplifying complications
2. Drug case gives religious exemptions a second fix
3. IHS in the News: IHS is best response to theocracy
4. IHS helps secular students organize at Albany schools
5. Infidels, students & IHS create freethought debate circuit
6. What do you think about the eBay atheist?
7. An English teacher moment
8. Sweet Reason will be back next week
9. Job opportunity: American Atheists staff
10. Letters to the Editor
11. Media Roundup
12. Cathartic Comics
13. Poll of the Week

Summaries, links, and MY TAKE across the break.

1. Agnostic Mom: The complication of simplifying complications
In this installment of Noell Hyman’s column on non-religious parenting, she describes how her family celebrated Darwin’s Theory of Evolution for six evenings to teach the kids about the progression of life. By the end the children were almost as excited about Darwin Week as they were about Christmas. MORE

MY TAKE: Cool. Maybe my wife and I will have a Darwinian Festivus instead of Christmas when we have kids.

2. Drug case gives religious exemptions a second fix
A recent Supreme Court decision has Dr. Tim Gordinier again revisiting the topic of illegal drugs and religious exemptions. MORE

MY TAKE: Another interesting and informative analysis by Dr. Gordinier.

3. IHS in the News: IHS is best response to theocracy
In this week’s edition of the Metroland, readers picked the Institute for Humanist Studies as the “Best Response to creeping theocracy: Institute For Humanist Studies.” Plus, Sweet Reason and HNN are mentioned in a national column. MORE

4. IHS helps secular students organize at Albany schools
A representative of the Secular Student Alliance (SSA) visited the Institute for Humanist Studies last week to help young secularists organize in the Northeast.  MORE

5. Infidels, students & IHS create freethought debate circuit
With a $2000 grant from the Institute for Humanist Studies, Internet Infidels has launched a project to facilitate oral debates on the existence of God and similar topics. In cooperation with the Secular Student Alliance and various student organizations across the United States, Internet Infidels will cosponsor debates from the Spring through Fall 2006 semesters. MORE

6. What do you think about the eBay atheist?
Hemant Mehta, the 22-year-old atheist from Chicago, rocketed into minor celebrity status after a front page article in the Wall Street Journal described his recent auction on eBay. What do you think about what Hemant is doing? Call the HNN listener line at 206-339-4168. MORE

MY TAKE: Wish I had thought of it.

7. An English teacher moment
Canadian columnist Doug Thomas examines what his English class would be like if it only examined works by non-theist writers. MORE

8. Sweet Reason will be back next week
… but there’s something YOU can do while you’re waiting for the next column. MORE

9. Job opportunity: American Atheists staff
American Atheists is seeking a qualified person for the position of Office Manager. MORE

10. Letters to the Editor
Letters on agnosticism, military recruitment, and a whole lot of other topics. MORE

11. Media Roundup
A roundup of stories from the mainstream media that are of interest to humanists. MORE

12. Cathartic Comics
…an assortment of cartoons and comic strips about humanism, atheism, religion, science and freethought. MORE

13. Poll of the Week
Should humanists welcome deists into the humanist fold? CAST YOUR VOTE

______________
About the IHS:

The IHS promotes nonreligious perspectives on social, political, and ethical issues and serves as a resource for and about the humanist community. Questions, comments, concerns, got a better joke or a story? Send a letter to the editor.

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If anything here interests you, or if you are one of those people who doesn’t “get” humanism, you may also be interested in my diary on what secular humanism is and what it is like to be a secular humanist in today’s political climate: I Am The Boogeyman.